A JOURNAL is a collection of different documents (e.g. articles, letters to the editors, reviews, etc.) on a particular subject area.
An ARTICLE is one type of the documents found in journals.
Your assignment requires articles from peer reviewed journals.
The PsycINFO database has the option to restrict your search to articles in peer reviewed journals, but this isn't always an option with other databases or Google Scholar.
If you have found a great article but you aren't sure if its journal is peer reviewed, use the instructions below to check out if the journal is peer reviewed.
How do you know if the articles in a journal are peer reviewed? Some databases allow you to limit to peer reviewed articles. For other databases, you need to look up the title of the journal in Ulrich's Periodical Directory.
Ulrich's Periodical Directory is a tool that allows you to check if the journal in which an article is published is peer-reviewed.
1. Find the Journal Title for your article.
In the citation below - Prevention Science is the Journal Title.
2. Open the directory : Ulrich's.
3. Type the JOURNAL TITLE (not the article title) into the search box, and click the green search button.
4. In the search results, look for a referee jersey icon to indicate that a journal is refereed. Referred is a synonym for peer reviewed.
5. Or you can click on a journal to see the full record. If it says Refereed Yes, then you know the journal (and the articles published in it) are refereed/peer-reviewed. Note: Only research articles are peer-reviewed. Things like letters to the editor, opinion pieces, book reviews, etc. are not peer-reviewed even though they are published in a peer-reviewed journal.
