Depending on the courses you take, your professors might expect you to find scholarly and peer-reviewed journal articles when doing research. Peer-review is a quality control process within the academic world to make sure that the best (valid, qualified) research is being published in journals and shared with the scholarly community. There is not one way to figure out if a journal or journal article is peer-reviewed. We have some tools at the library to help you figure it out!
Many of our databases, especially the ones provided to us through EBSCO, have "Peer-Reviewed" filter option on the left-hand side of the results. This is probably the easiest way to narrow down your results to only peer-reviewed research articles. Watch the video below to see it in action:
Journal Finder is a tool that allows you to search for a specific journal title and see whether, and exactly where, the SHU library has access to it. Journal Finder all let's you know whether the journal is peer-reviewed.
Sometimes, when using Google or Google Scholar, you come across an interesting or relevant article that is worth your time to read. If you're on-campus, you might have no trouble accessing the full-text of certain articles because, even though you found it using Google, you are using the library's resources to actually get to it. If you're an online or distance student, you might face pay walls where the journal or publisher demands money (a lot of money) to be able to read those articles. SHU Library has two tools that can help if you ever find yourself in this situation: Citation Linker and Inter Library Loan.
The video below explains how to use Citation Linker to find an article within the library's databases.
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