Gender & Sexuality Studies: Articles

Identifying whether a journal or article is peer-reviewed can be challenging. Here are a few tips for figuring out if the article you are looking at is peer-reviewed.

1. The Journal
   
• Many databases provide the option to limit your search in a way that will only find results in scholarly or peer-reviewed journals. You’ll want to look over the search page or the results page for an option to search for only scholarly or peer-reviewed journals. In the UW Libraries catalog, for example, you can do this from the search results page. There is an “Availability” box on the left side of the screen and you can click on “Peer-reviewed journals” to change your search results.
• Ulrichsweb is a database that will allow to search for journals by name and tell you whether or not the journal is peer-reviewed.>
• One important thing to know about peer-reviewed journals is that not all of the content is peer-reviewed. Peer-reviewed journals often include things like book reviews that do not go through the peer-review process, while the articles based on original research are peer-reviewed. It is therefore important to be able to distinguish articles that are peer-reviewed from articles that are not.


2. The Article

Peer-reviewed articles contain similar types of information, therefore looking over an article for these elements is a good way of determining if the article is peer-reviewed.

• Is there a summary or abstract at the start of the article? Does the article have introduction and conclusion sections?
• Does the author discuss what research methods they used to conduct the research?
• Does the article explain the research findings and discuss the findings in depth?
• Is there a references or works cited section at the end of the article?
• How long is the article? Peer-reviewed articles vary in length though tend to be between 10 – 30 pages long.

If you can find all of these parts, it is safe to assume that the article you’re looking at is peer-reviewed.