SOC 101 - Yasmin Cordero - Online - Summer 2025

Research articles that have been published in scholarly journals must pass a quality test called peer review.

• A scholar (expert) writes an article to report their research and findings.
• The article uses the language or jargon of that field of study; Other researchers are the primary audience or readers.
• The author submits the draft article to an academic/scholarly journal in their field of study.
• If the journal’s editor decides that the article is a good fit for their journal, they pass it along to a group of experts (peers or referees) to evaluate the article's quality, in a process called "peer review."
• If the reviewers recommend the article for publication, they may also request certain revisions. The editor gets the final say.
• It can take months or years between the draft article and publication!

Note: Other words used to describe such peer-reviewed articles include Scholarly, Academic, and Refereed.

To start to identify scholarly articles sometimes called peer-reviewed articles in scholarly or research journals, look for these characteristics:

• An abstract (a one paragraph summary of the article at the beginning)
• Written by an authority or expert in the field (author affiliations, credentials, & place of work are usually listed on first page)
• Titles of scholarly journals are more likely to contain the words like "Journal", "Review", "Bulletin", or "Research" than publications produced for a general audience
• Articles themselves are usually lengthy with a narrow or specific subject focus. For example:
  • Narrow: "The impact of 'stop-go' demand management policy on Britain's consumer durables industries, 1952-65"
  • General: "British history
• Contains original research, experimentation, or in-depth studies in the field/subject discipline (determining this point requires - at minimum - reading the abstract!)
• May have sections describing methodology used to conduct the research
• Language used in the article includes specialized terms and the jargon of the subject discipline/field.That shows it is written for researchers, professors, or students in the field
• Usually a formal appearance and - in some fields/subject disciplines - the presence of tables, graphs, and diagrams
• Advertising is minimal or none (Don't dwell on this point. This characteristic was easier to identify when periodicals/journals were available solely in print. Electronic access typically eliminates the advertisements from the library databases!)
• Reviewed by other experts from the subject discipline/field before publication (peer-reviewed or refereed)
• A list of citations to articles, books, and other sources at the end of the article. Also called literature cited, bibliography, or references depending on the journal's field/subject discipline.