Sugata Mitra: Build a School in the Cloud. Home - Evaluating Information Sources - Subject Guides at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY. Internet Detective | Home. Peer Review in Scientific Publishing. When you go to see your doctor with a health complaint, he or she might make a preliminary diagnosis and then send you to a specialist to get a more detailed exam. For example, if you have foot pain, you might be sent to a podiatrist. A rash might be indicative of a skin disorder and merit examination by a dermatologist, or it may be due to some type of allergy, thus calling for an allergist's opinion. Patients complaining of chest pains might be sent to multiple specialists, including a cardiologist, pulmonologist, gastroenterologist, or others depending on the nature of their pain.
General practitioners know that there are far too many different and highly specific medical afflictions for one person to understand them all in detail, so they rely on a team of specialists to keep their patients healthy. Figure 1: Scientific journals publish results from diverse research projects. To top History and development of peer review Comprehension Checkpoint Peer reviewers Peer review in practice. Scholarly vs. Popular Periodicals (final) What Is A Peer-Reviewed Article? - Evaluating Information Sources - Subject Guides at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY.
When you are determining whether or not the article your found is a peer-reviewed article, you should consider the following questions: Is the journal in which you found the article published or sponsored by a professional scholarly society, professional association, or university academic department? Does it describe itself as a peer-reviewed publication? (To know that, check the journal's website). Did you find a citation for it in one of the databases that includes scholarly publications?
(Criminal Justice Abstracts, EBSCOhost Academic Search Complete, PsycINFO, etc.)? Read the database description to see if it includes scholarly publications. Did you limit your search to scholarly or peer-reviewed publications? Is there an abstract (summary) at the beginning of the article? Is the tone of the article thoughtful, restrained and serious? Does the article have footnotes or citations of other sources? Does the article have a bibliography or list of references at the end?