Students are often encouraged by their lecturers to use scholarly materials when selecting literature to use for their assignments. One way to do this is to look for journal articles which have been peer reviewed - this is a process by which respected academic journals subject potential article submissions to scrutiny (usually by a group of experts or 'peers') before agreeing to publish the research. This means that any articles which have been reviewed and accepted in this way are considered to be of a high academic standard.
The LibrarySearch catalogue
Once you have done a search and have some results, look in the left-hand filters under the "Availability" heading and tick the box for 'Peer-reviewed Journals'. This will update your results and remove anything that has not been published in a Peer-reviewed Journal Title.
Subject databases
Some databases will need you to apply the relevant filter before you run a search, others will allow you to apply it after you have some results.
Remember that the content type of databases will vary - some will contain magazine and newspaper articles which the peer review filter will remove from the results for you, others only contain academic materials so you won't necessarily see a peer reviewed filter.
Below are some examples of the relevant filter options on three of our most popular journal database platforms.
EBSCOhost databases, e.g. Medline and Cinahl
Go to the Advanced Search page and scroll past the search boxes for your keywords down to the 'Limit your results' section:
ProQuest databases, e.g. ABI/INFORM and Nursing & Allied Health
The Basic Search (first image) and Advanced Search (second image) forms both allow you to tick the box to limit to peer reviewed before you search:
ScienceDirect
This database ONLY contains academic sources so you won't find an actual 'peer review' filter in it. However, as many academic journals contain conference abstracts, book reviews, etc. which are not peer reviewed you should limit your results just to 'Research articles'.
Once you have done a search look at the filter options on the left hand side under 'Refine by' and 'Article type'. We recommend using the 'Research articles' filter because they are primary research, whereas the other option for 'Review articles' tend to be secondary sources such as literature reviews:
If you need help using a specific database, please contact us.
