Research Minutes is a series for undergraduate students at Cornell University covering library research topics. This segment discusses how to recognize and find scholarly journal articles.
Publishing in a scholarly (academic/scientific) journal is usually preceded by a thorough examination, known as peer review, of the article. Peers/referees, i.e. researchers active within same subject field/discipline as the author of the submitted article, review the article and assess the scientific quality of the article. They evaluate the methods, the observations, the conclusions and the scientific theory approach. Almost all scientific articles that have been accepted for publication will have undergone minor or major revisions made by authors after recommendations by peers.
There are different tools available so you can learn by yourself how to identify scholarly journals and learn how to compare them. By using tools like these ones, you can see if a journal is peer reviewed or not. You can identify high ranking and whether or not it's suitable to use when you want to write and cite a source. By learning how to use these tools you will get a good start when you are looking at a new journal and want to evaluate the quality of the sources you are using or if an article is highly ranked.
