Do you ever wonder how you can tell whether a journal is peer-reviewed or scholarly? In this tutorial, I’ll show you how identify peer-reviewed journals using tools from the Laurier Library. Peer-reviewed journals publish articles that have been evaluated by experts before publication.
There are several methods you can use to identify these kinds of journals. One method to identify peer-reviewed journals is by limiting your search results. Many databases let you limit your results to only peer-reviewed journals by the use of a check-box before you search.
This example is from the Business Source Complete database. Note that sometimes the terms “academic” or “scholarly” are used to denote peer-reviewed journals. The ProQuest database uses a similar method.
There may be times however, when it is important to identify if a journal is peer-reviewed using different tools than those found in a database. For example if you are reviewing research listed in a bibliography of a book or research paper, you may come across references to publications that are unfamiliar to you, and you’d like to know if they are peer-reviewed or not. If that’s the case, you should consult a tool known as Ulrichsweb Global Serials directory.
To access Ulrich’s, start at the library homepage, library. wlu. ca Click the Databases link at the left side of the page, and then click the Browse “by title” link that appears in the middle.
At the top of the next page in the alphabetical listing, select the “U” at the dropdown menu, then click apply. Next, find the link for Ulrichsweb and click that link. This is the main page for Ulrich’s, with a quick search box at the top.
We can do a quick search by typing in the title we’re looking for and then clicking the small Search icon. In our list of results, we can see this title is a refereed or peer-reviewed journal. This is indicated by the small icon beside the title.
Clicking on the title leads us to another page with additional information about the publication. Here we see what type of document the publication is, when it was started, and how often it is published. If you have any questions, ask us at library.
wlu. ca/help/askus.
