Peer review is the
"...process whereby experts in a given field help judge the value of a relevant work or ideas that they were not part of creating. The primary function of peer review is gatekeeping—selecting the best from a pool of submissions. It also serves, however, as a source of constructive criticism, whereby expert feedback by peers can be taken into account to improve ideas, research proposals, and papers."
"Peer review." Britannica Academic, Encyclopædia Britannica, 13 Feb. 2017. academic-eb-com.scsu.idm.oclc.org/levels/collegiate/article/peer-review/627766. Accessed 26 Nov. 2018
The simplest way to find a peer-reviewed article is to use a database helps you search for peer reviewed journals.
Look for a check box near the search box for Peer-Review or Scholarly Journals.
This will limit your search to articles in scholarly journals, but not necessarily to the research articles in those journals. To find only research articles:
Some of the databases that have Scholarly/Peer Reviewed check boxes are:
If you have an article already and want to know if it was published in a peer reviewed journal, you can look that journal up in Ulrich's Periodical Directory. Look up the journal title (not the article itself). Ulrich's uses "refereed" instead of "peer reviewed".
The following video, Peer Review in 3 Minutes from NC State University Libraries, provides a very brief overview of the peer review process.
"Peer Review in 3 Minutes" by Anne Burke, Andreas Orphanides, Hyun-Duck Chung, Daria Dorafshar, Kyle Langdon, and Kim Duckett is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States license.
