What is a Peer Reviewed Journal Article? (What's Peer Review?)

at university you'll often be asked to reference peer-reviewed journal articles in your essays so in this video i'm going to explain to you exactly what a peer-reviewed journal article is why they're so good and how you can find them for free online for when you write your next essay so there are lots of different types of sources that you can use when writing an essay you could use the internet like blogs you can use your university library and get actual physical textbooks to read and reference or you can use journal articles i've gone through in

a previous video i'll leave the card above on which ones are best and which ones are worst but in that video i talked about how peer-reviewed journal articles are usually the best quality articles you can find so why are they such good quality well a peer-reviewed journal article is an article that's written in an academic journal these are journals that researchers like professors publish the findings of their research in when they publish those findings they'll write an article and they'll submit it to the journal the journal will then send the article off to a bunch

of experts who can review the article and say whether or not it's good enough quality to be published in an academic journal they can give four recommendations the first recommendation is to accept if they recommend to accept the article it gets published straight away only three percent of articles that are submitted to a journal get published immediately the second option that they can do is to suggest minor revisions only seven percent of articles get accepted with minor revisions that means the article will get sent back to the author and they'll have to make little changes

and then it will get published the third option is to suggest major revisions that means that the authors get given back the feedback from the experts and they have to rewrite the whole article and then resubmit it for review once again that happens 10 of the time and then a whopping 80 of the time the person's article that was submitted to the journal gets rejected outright this difficult process for getting an article published in an academic peer-reviewed journal is what makes it such high quality when you actually get an article in a journal there are

so many checks and balances involved that the articles that end up at the very end being published are the best quality that you can find so the next question is where can you find these peer-reviewed journal articles so you can read them and reference them for your next essay one of the main places you'll be able to find them is your university's online library catalog use that online library catalog to search for articles that you can reference in your essay so say you're doing an essay on types of globalization you can use the online library

database to type in types of globalization and find out which journal articles are out there that talk about this topic another way that you can find peer-reviewed journal articles online is to use google scholar the great thing about google scholar is that these articles are free so they're not hidden behind any paywalls i'll show you how to use google scholar and to find free online journal articles in the next video in this series this video is part of a mini series on how to conduct research at university so like and subscribe and follow this whole

playlist for more helpful tips and tricks on how to conduct research and do referencing at university