When searching for and using information, you need to be sure you can trust the content for accuracy and quality. Regardless of the topic, you will determine the author, the content, and whether it is valuable to you. For academic sources, one major way they are assessed for credibility, bias, and accurate content is through the peer-review process.

You’ve probably heard from your instructor that you need to use peer-reviewed sources for your research. What does peer-review mean? In academic journals, research articles are reviewed for accuracy and originality by other researchers in the same field (i.e. the author’s peers) before they are published.

The main purpose of a scholarly journal article is to report on original research or experimentation in order to make such information available to the rest of the scholarly world. Since an article is rigorously reviewed by the journal’s editors and other experts in the field before it is accepted for publication, the information is generally considered to be accurate (however, the system isn’t perfect and sometimes bad information gets published-- when that happens, the journal will issue a retraction or correction).

Here is an example of a scholarly article that has been peer-reviewed:

Screenshot of scholarly article

Image credit: Screen shot of "Japanese Legacy Cohorts: The Life Span Study Atomic Bomb Survivor Cohort and Survivor's Offspring".

Some characteristics of of scholarly and peer-reviewed articles:

Written by a scholar or expert in the field
Usually cite sources in the form of footnotes or bibliographies
Language is typically that of the discipline covered (e.g. lots of jargon and acronyms)
Usually assume that the reader has some prior knowledge of the topic or problem

Here is a video from KULibraries (Links to an external site.) (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) that will help you visualize the peer-review process:

Adapted from UW Libraries Undergraduate Research Tutorial CC Attribution Noncommercial

Video Advanced Search and Peer Review Research