What is a peer-reviewed article?
Publishing scholarly articles in a journal is one of the main ways that knowledge is built in a field.
The peer-reviewed, or refereed, process is an organized way for scientists to communicate the findings from their work to others in their scientific community.
In science, peer review works something like this:
- A scientist, or group of researchers, completes a study and writes it up in the form of an article. Then submits the article to a scholarly journal.
- The journal's editors send the article to several other scientists who work in the same field (the "peers" of peer review).
- The peer reviewers evaluate the work, checking for accuracy and validity, and decide whether the study is of high enough quality to be published.
- Only articles that meet high scientific standards of being logical, well-designed, backed up with evidence, reliable, etc. are published.
As a student in science, it is important to use these scholarly articles that have been vetted by experts.
