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PD11 Research Guide: Peer review

What is peer review?

Peer review is the process of having subject matter experts evaluate the work of other researchers before publication. Watch this video (3:15 min) to learn about the steps in the peer review process.

  1. Researchers will write up their work and send it to a journal.
  2. If the journal editor thinks that the paper meets their journal's subject area and standards, the journal editor sends the paper to other experts for evaluation.
  3. Those other experts evaluate the work (for example, did the researchers use a valid methodology to answer their question? Are their conclusions based on the observed results?). Sometimes the peer reviewers will request the authors make changes to improved the quality of the article.
  4. If the reviewers and editor decide that the article is quality research then the article is accepted for publication.

Only research articles in academic journals (and some conferences, usually in computer science and engineering) publish peer reviewed work.

  • Magazines might publish articles written by people with specific subject area knowledge, and those articles may be edited by someone at the magazine, but they do not undergo the same level of critical evaluation by subject experts as academic journal research articles.

  • Academic journals may publish other things like letters to the editors, book reviews, and editorials but these do not undergo the same level of critical evaluation by subject experts as academic journal research articles.

Peer review in 3 minutes

How do I know if my article was peer reivewed?

  1. Find an article using an academic research database

    • Begin your search for articles within an academic research database which indexes peer reviewed articles. In your search results you can usually limit your results to only see the peer reviewed articles (sometimes these are called 'academic' or 'scholarly' articles). 

    • A list of academic research databases can be found on the Find articles tab of this guide.

  2. Check the journal that published that article 

    • In this step, you need to look up the journal title, not the article title. A journal will usually have a shorter name that describes a subject area (for example, Mathematics of Computation), while an article will usually have a longer title describing a specific study (for example, "A fast and stable test to check if a weakly diagonally dominant matrix is a nonsingular M-matrix").

    • A journal's website includes information about the peer review process. Look in the section for Instructions for Authors or Editorial process. This should outline the article manuscript submission process and indicate if it uses a peer review process.

    • Ulrichsweb Global Serial Directory indicates if a journal uses the peer review process. Search for the journal title (not the article title) and look for the peer review symbol.