ISS 3010: Intro to Social Sciences

Peer-review refers to the process where an author's work is reviewed or vetted by experts in the subject field before it is published in a scholarly / academic journal. This kind of review is often "blind" where the reviewers may not know who the author is and vice versa. The peer-review process helps to ensure that quality of article is good; the hypothesis or research question has merit and the methodology, results and conclusions are appropriate, accurate and reproducible. Although peer review may help to establish credibility, research, data, and knowledge may change over time and you should always use your critical thinking skills when evaluating research.

Your professor will often ask you to use scholarly sources for all or most of your research.  What constitutes “scholarly?”  Here are a few tips that might help you make that determination:

Popular Magazines:

• Often include short articles, often just a few pages
• May include articles that don’t indicate an author
• May not provide a bibliography or indicate the origin of the information that they use in the article
• Are normally written in a language that is very comprehensible to the general public
• Often include glitzy photos, advertisements, etc.
• Often published frequently—on a daily, weekly, or monthly schedule

Scholarly Journals:

• Normally discuss philosophical, historical, or experimental research
• Identifies the author(s) of the article and normally list their academic or institutional affiliations
• Often contain the following sections or variations thereof:  literature review, methodology, results, discussion
• Contain a bibliography and/or footnotes
• Often requires some technical expertise or specialized knowledge to fully comprehend the text
• Illustrations are research oriented photos, graphs, tables, and charts
• Are often “peer reviewed” where experts evaluate the validity and methodology of the research before publication

Popular Books:

• Are normally written in a language that is very comprehensible to the general public
• Purpose is to entertain or inform the general public
• May not provide a bibliography or indicate the origin of the information that they use in the book
• May provide a good number of illustrations

Scholarly Books:

• Normally discuss philosophical, historical, or experimental research
• Contain a bibliography and/or footnotes
• Often includes an index
• Often requires some technical expertise or specialized knowledge to fully comprehend the text
• Some publishers tend to focus on scholarly works rather than popular books.  If the book was published by a university press, which may be an indication that the book is scholarly although commercial presses can publish scholarly works as well.

For additional information, see the online learning module on “How to Recognize Scholarly Research” in a link below.