Peer Reviewed Sources

0:01Hey everyone, it's Nick Dease, Film and Humanities librarian at the Boatwright

0:05Library. Today we're going to talk about the value of peer-reviewed sources and how they can elevate

0:11your research. First things first, what exactly is a peer-reviewed source? A peer-reviewed source is

0:17a publication that has gone through a strict evaluation process by experts in the field.

0:23Each submitted article is rigorously assessed for quality, accuracy, and contribution to the

0:28field before it's published. Submissions are often evaluated through a double-blind peer

0:33review process where neither the authors nor the reviewers know each other's identities.

0:39The reviewers must ultimately evaluate the work without any preconceptions about the authors.

0:45You might hear "refereed" and "peer reviewed" used interchangeably. Just note that they both refer to

0:51the same rigorous process, ensuring that scholarly conversations are based on sound research. So,

0:58why is this important to you? Well, as a scholar, the integrity of your research is key.

1:04Peer-reviewed articles are considered high quality because they've been vetted by professionals.

1:09This process ensures credibility, providing you with the reliable information to support

1:14your academic work. While "scholarly" implies that content is written by and for experts,

1:21not all scholarly works are peer-reviewed. Peer-reviewed materials are a subset,

1:26implying they've met an even higher standard of scrutiny. For example, some academic books written

1:32by scholars are not subjected to the formal peer review process, though they may still be reviewed

1:38by editors. Similarly, thesis and dissertations are written by graduate students and are reviewed

1:45and approved by a thesis or dissertation committee uh but not through a blind review process. So,

1:52how do we actually go about finding peer-reviewed articles in OneSearch and verifying whether or not

1:58journals are peer-reviewed. Well, one way to start out is to begin with a keyword search.

2:04So I'm just going to plug in uh the name of a philosopher that I'm interested in here called

2:09Albert Camus and I'm going to hit search. And if I look here at the search results, you can see

2:16there's a lot of information about these items but it's not immediately clear to me if any of them

2:22are peer reviewed. Well one thing that I can do to ensure that what I'm looking at is a scholarly

2:27and peer-reviewed source is to enable the filter here that we have on the left sidebar. So, if I

2:33check this box for scholarly and peer reviewed and I click on "apply filters," you'll see here

2:40in the center results that all of them now have this icon that says "peer reviewed." Right? So,

2:45this is one really helpful way to immediately find peer- reviewed articles and content. Another way

2:52to verify that some of these publications are peer- reviewed is to actually look them up. So

2:58this first article here at the top comes to us from"Frontiers in psychology." If I copy the

3:04name of this title and I hop on over to Google uh and I just search the name of this journal I can

3:11look here on the right sidebar and see uh that it says it's a peer-reviewed journal and it says it

3:18is peer-reviewed open access academic Journal uh and this comes to us from Wikipedia. Uh however,

3:24I always think it's a great idea just to go to the original source. So I'm going to go to the

3:29Frontiers in Psychology website and if I click on that it will give me this nice little page

3:35here. At the top you'll see there's a section called "about Journal." Most academic journals

3:40will have this type of a page. So if I click on "about this journal" uh and I go down here over to

3:48"Quality" uh it will give me some uh description of how this journal is put together. And you can

3:54see right here um it tells me that they use uh "single anonymized peer review model process." So,

4:01this is another way that you can determine if this publication is in fact peer reviewed. Now,

4:08another way that you can do this is to look up the publication in a database that we

4:13have access to uh called "UlrichsWeb," uh which is for looking up publication

4:18information. And so, from the homepage of our website, library.richmond.edu,

4:24you can scroll down here and click on "Research databases." And then, from here, I'm going to

4:30narrow down this list to the "U" section by clicking on "U" and then I'm going to click

4:35on "Ulrichsweb." And I'm just going to paste that title that I copied from earlier right in here,

4:42so "Frontiers in Psychology," and then click on "search." And you can see in the results, it is

4:48the very first one here at the top and you'll note it has this little icon right here. Uh and what

4:53this little icon designates is that this journal is indeed refereed or peer-reviewed. So, that's

5:00three different ways uh to verify that something is peer-reviewed. You can look in OneSearch,

5:06you can search the journal via Google, and you can go to Ulrichsweb. And that about wraps up our

5:15tutorial. Use peer-reviewed sources to enrich your research and elevate your academic pursuits and

5:21visit our library website, library.richmond.edu for more support. Happy studying!