ECM 1120 Information Literacy: Peer-Reviewed

Last week we talked about creating good search terms... but where should you search? A lot of students use Google for their academic research, but Google isn't always the best place to find the kind of information you need.

Sometimes you'll get an instructor that asks you to use peer-reviewed or scholarly journals in your assignment. What does that mean? How do we find them?

Academic or scholarly journals are a type of periodical, like a magazine or newspaper. "Periodical" means that it's published on a regular schedule and not just one time, like a book. Academic journals have articles like regular magazines, but the articles are meant for academic purposes. These journals are published by academic institutions, about specific subjects, and they're focused on narrow, precise topics.

Most importantly, academic journals and academic articles are peer-reviewed. This means they're reviewed and approved by people in the same field for quality and credibility.

You can't get peer-reviewed articles in Google because the peer-review and publishing process takes a lot of money, so we have to pay to access them. That's where the library comes in! The library pays for access to databases full of scholarly journal articles so you can have access to them as a student.

We have a bunch of different article databases on different subjects (like an education database, a psychology database, etc) that you can use when you're doing research. I recommend ProQuest Central for people starting out with their research, because it has articles from a bunch of different subject areas.

Your professors and librarians recommend these library databases because the articles in them have been specifically selected for quality, which makes them more reliable than a lot of things you can find elsewhere on the Internet. This doesn't mean everything in an academic article is true! But you can generally trust an academic article more than something else that hasn't been reviewed.

Below are two short videos that explain peer-review and academic journals in more detail!