Articles in peer-reviewed journals are reviewed by a group of the writer's peers (aka other academics in his/her field) before the articles are published. A scholarly journal is a journal that has been peer reviewed.

For print journals:

• On the inside of the cover or on the first page or two, the peer review process will be outlined by the publisher, or go to the journal's website and look at the article submission guidelines to determine if the journal has a peer review process.

For an e-journal or any publication you are not sure about:

• Use Ulrichsweb  to determine if the journal is peer-reviewed or refereed. After you have typed in the name of the journal, if you see this symbol[refereed] you will know the journal has been peer reviewed.

In the example shown below, both the online and print versions of Earth Sciences History are peer-reviewed, while Earth Sciences is not.

Journal Citation Reports (JCR) lists the impact factors of journals from science and social science disciplines. The 2024 JCR Reference Guide details how impact factors and other metrics are evaluated. JCR is produced each year by Clarivate, an analytics company that also created the citation index Web of Science. JCR provides access to the following metrics:

• Impact Factor: a ratio which divides a journal's received citations by a count of its published articles over the two years since its publication. Essentially, the frequency with which an "average article" in a journal has been cited in a given year, or an evaluative measure of a journal's relative importance. A journal impact factor (JIF) of 6.5 means that the "average article" published two years ago in that journal has been cited 6.5 times.

• Immediacy Index: the average number of times an article is cited in the year it is published.

• Eigenfactor Score: a measure of the journal's total importance to the scientific community, based on the number of times articles published in the journal in the last five years have been cited in the JCR year. Citations from highly-ranked journals are more heavily weighted than citations from lower-ranked journals. It is produced by Eigenfactor.org.

• Article Influence Score: the average influence, per article, of the papers in a journal. It is calculated by multiplying the journal's Eigenfactor Score by 0.01 and dividing it by the number of articles in the journal. Like the Eigenfactor Score, it is produced by Eigenfactor.org.

• Journal Self Citation: contribution of journal self citation to its Impact Factor; a type of journal-level citation distortion that occurs when a journal has an unusually high percentage of journal self-citations (when an article published in a journal cites another article published in the same journal) as compared to non-self citations.