Assessing a Peer-Reviewed Journal

Peer Reviewed Journals

For some of your assignments you will be using articles from what are known as peerreviewed professional journals. Such journals contain articles that have been reviewed by professionals in the field and deemed to be worthy of publication because they make a contribution to the field. They are called peer-reviewed because the articles are reviewed by the peers (professional colleagues) of the article authors who work in the same field. However, this is all done in a blind review process. This means that the reviewers do not know the identity of the article author when they review an article. The reviewers receive the article, read it, and issue comments and a judgment on whether it should be published in the journal, rejected, or revised and resubmitted. Also, the article author does not know who did the reviewing. Typically, a paper will be reviewed by 3-5 reviewers. The reason for this process is to assure that only articles that make a contribution to the field are published, and to assure through anonymity that nothing but the merits of the article influence the decision to publish the article. Peer-reviewed journals are NOT popular publications such as Time Magazine, the New York Times, Newsweek, People, etc.! They are also not articles on advocacy web sites such as that of the ACLU, PETA, NOW, etc. They also are not online encyclopedias, such as Wikipedia. Please do not use or cite Wikipedia as a source in your writings. As you may know, there are numerous issues with the accuracy of information in Wikipedia. When you search for articles you do not start by going to the individual journals. The easy way is to conduct a search using key words (such as prejudice, discrimination, gender, race, etc.) in the search engine in the database you are working in. The search will lead you to articles in journals that pertain to your topic. You will find these in the Baker library. Here are the instructions on how to access the databases. 1. Click the "Library" tab at the top of your screen in Blackboard. 2. Click "Find articles and databases." 3. You will see a list of subject areas. Click Social Sciences/Social Issues/Human Services. 4. You will now see a list of databases in the right column. The databases from which you can obtain articles for this course are the following: Academic Onefile (InfoTrac) Diversity Studies Collection (InfoTrac) OmniFile Full text select

Proquest Psychology Journals Psychology Collection (InfoTrac) Religion and Philosophy Collection (Infotrac) War and Terrorism Collection (Infotrac) 5. Click the database you wish to use. For instance, click "Academic Onefile (InfoTrac). 6. This will take you to a search page. Enter the term(s) you wish to search for in the keyword search box. For instance, enter prejudice." Now click the checkboxes for to documents with full text and to peer-reviewed publications. Then click the little magnifying class icon to start the search. IMPORTANT: Make sure to click the box for peer reviewed publications. This will assure that you only retrieve peer-reviewed journal articles, which are what are required for your assignment. If you do not do this your search will bring up non-peer-reviewed articles, which you cannot use for the assignment. 7. After clicking the "Search" button you will see a list of articles that you can click on and read. You can do the same thing with the other databases in the list above. You may have to search several databases to find exactly what you are looking for. That is it! Doing this will become second nature after you have gone through the process a few times. Naturally, if you have any questions about this please let the instructor know.

Library number: 23504105140770