Research and Course Guides: PUBH 465: Public Health Research Methods: Peer Review Process

Is it Peer Reviewed?

"Peer review" is the process through which experts in a field of study examine and assess the quality of articles before they are published.

Sometimes the term "refereed" is used instead of "peer reviewed".

You can identify Peer reviewed journals in our database, Ulrich's:

Ulrichsweb This link opens in a new window
Ulrichsweb is a bibliographic database providing detailed, comprehensive, and authoritative information on serials published throughout the world. It covers all subjects, and includes publications that are published regularly or irregularly and are circulated free of charge or by paid subscription.

Pro	Con
Experts review research and argument Double-blind: neither reviewer nor the author knows the other	Can be closed to new ideas, methodologies, or questions Community of scholars may be small, so often the reviewer and author know who each other is Slow process: may go through several iterations before publishing. Can take over a year to publish
Possible solutions?
Publish to the Internet immediately after acceptance. Skip the print process, publish more quickly Open review. Publish the names of reviewers before or after acceptance. Make reviewers responsible for their work Publish reviews of the articles with the article. Researchers don’t have to reiterate their experiments, but readers can see what others have seen as weaknesses, flaws, or limitations of the research (Current Anthropology, Atmospheric and Chemistry Physics)