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You will often be asked by your professor to find a scholarly or peer- reviewed article. The two terms are often interchangeably, although “peer-reviewed” is a narrower terms and explicitly refers to articles that have been reviewed by experts in the field before being published.  Most “scholarly” articles are, in fact, peer reviewed, but there are a few “scholarly” journals that publish works of scholars and have a rigorous editing process, but do not specifically use the peer-reviewers as part of this process.

One way you can search for scholarly or peer-reviewed articles is to

1. Go to the library homepage at http://library.ubalt.edu
2. Enter search terms in the “library search” box
3. After you get results, click on the “peer-reviewed” check box.  This will limit your results to articles that are published in journals that use a peer-review process.

However, you cannot rely on the “peer-reviewed” filter to be 100% accurate.  The two videos below will help you recognize peer-reviewed articles.

Check Your Knowledge

Anatomy of a Scholarly Article

Scholarly articles and peer reviewed articles are both written by experts or scholars in a particular field of study.  Peer reviewed articles are subject to a review and approval by other experts, known as “peers”; scholarly articles are written by experts in a field but may not be reviewed by peers before publication.

However, scholarly articles and peer reviewed articles look similar, which is important so you can differentiate between scholarly or peer reviewed sources and other types of sources (see the video above about search filters).   The anatomy of a scholarly article will demonstrate what these types of articles contain and why those pieces are important.