About the Peer Review Process

The Peer Review process has historically been viewed as a gold standard for scholarly articles that students and researchers should be using. Peer reviewed scholarly journals have articles that contain original research, written by AND addressed to experts in a specific discipline. It is a type of research that you will likely be told to evaluate or find at some point during your academic career.

Characteristics of the Peer Review Process

The peer review process happens when an article is submitted to a peer reviewed journal, as the journal’s editors send the article to other scholars (or ‘peers’) in the same research field.

As a measure of integrity, the reviewers’ identities are unknown to the author, and the author’s identity is typically unknown to the reviewers. Based on the reviewers’ feedback, the article may be accepted, conditional with suggested revisions, or rejected. If accepted and published, this article is considered suitable as a source of information for your work.

Searching for Peer-Reviewed Sources

On OMNI, as well as other scholarly databases, you can filter results from a string search on whether it is a peer-reviewed article or available through a peer-reviewed journal.

Want to find out if a journal is peer-reviewed? It’s possible to find out if a journal is peer-reviewed through subscribed databases.

The Caveat of Peer Review

However, knowledge authority is much wider and more diverse than what is published in academia. There is power and privilege with for those who decide what is the standard and who is the authority on the information an article speaks about. It can be difficult for those in the community with lived experience or less ‘established’ members of the academy to participate.

Also, the pressures of publishing in the academic world are very real. The quality or quantity of your sources under a ‘publish or perish’ framework can be drastically shaped because of such demands. These politics can affect many researchers, such as Indigenous academics who cite the difficulty and biases they face when under the peer review process. This is why it is so important to critically engage with and reconsider what the Peer Review process and its sources mean to the research landscape and for the broader community.

What Does This Mean for You?

First, it is important to acknowledge the limitations of the peer review process, but also to learn how to effectively use it during your academic career. Not everyone gets to publish or be seen in the academic world, which means there may be perspectives missing from your research!

Second, this chapter focuses on diverse and thorough evaluation approaches, meaning that having the peer review process alongside employing other knowledge-equity methods can enrich your research and teach valuable skills. It can even incite change in academia of moving beyond historically harmful practices and instead measure tangible and positive behaviours!

Resources

• PLoS: Understanding the Publishing Process
• Simon Fraser University Library: What is Peer Review?