What is Peer Review?

You’ll likely be asked to use scholarly, peer-reviewed information in your assignments. The question is, what’s peer-review, and why is it important? Watch the following short video for a quick introduction (1:33).

In university, you'll often have to cite scholarly, peer reviewed information to back up your arguments and perspectives. There are a lot of different options. Like journal articles, books, book chapters, and more. It can get tricky making heads or tails of peer review. This video will show you how.

Using peer reviewed information is important because of the unique quality control process that this information must go through before it is published. So, before an article, for example, is published several other experts review the findings of the article to ensure that the information is accurate and methods appropriate. In some cases, the reviewers will reject the article. In others, they will send the article back to the author and ask for specific revisions. In very rare cases, the article is accepted without any revisions at all. This process isn't perfect, and it can take a very long time. But it's the main quality cont rol process underpinning academic research since the first peer reviewed journal in 1665.

It can be really frustrating working with all the different types of information out there. If you ever need a helping hand just reach out to a librarian. We're here to help.

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