How to identify Scholarly and Peer-Reviewed Sources
This short video explain the terms scholarly/academic and peer-reviewed (or refereed) and how to identify whether a book would be considered "scholarly.
Journal Articles:
If you found a journal article via a list of works cited, a reference on the internet at large or via Google Scholar, it may not be clear whether the article is from a peer-reviewed journal.
You can use the directory below (Ulrich's Web) to check whether the journal the article is published in is a peer-reviewed journal or not.
You can also enter the title of the article into LibrarySearch and if turns up there, if it's from a peer-reviewed journal, it should have a "peer-reviewed" label indicating this.
Please keep in mind:
Many scholarly journals do not display a "peer-reviewed" label and guarantee but are still reliable.
There is typically always an editorial process, but it may differ from the established "peer-review process".
Be thorough; when it's unclear, navigate to the journal publisher's webpage (sometimes a this is a university or research institute within a university), look for information such as an "about this journal" page.
On articles, look for the academic credentials of the authors in the header, footer or at the end of the article (or hyperlinked). You can also web search the author(s)' names.
Check also that article authors, in turn, have cited their (scholarly) sources for the article.
Books and Chapters from Books:
The majority of the non-fiction books in the E.J. Pratt and all of the University of Toronto Libraries tend to be "scholarly publications".
Books and chapters in anthologies would be subject to a form of "peer review" by an editorial committee which is typically made up of fellow academics in the same field or in broader or related subject areas/disciplines.
NOTE: The "peer review" limiter in LibrarySearch and other databases though only applies to articles because it's a tracked and tagged feature and that's not a standardized (metadata) label for books.
