Macdonald-Kelce Library: Physics: Evaluating Sources

How to Tell If It's Peer-reviewed

How to Tell if an Article is Peer Reviewed

S mortarboard icon ome databases will have indicators to let you know if your source is peer-reviewed. ProQuest, for example, uses a mortarboard icon to indicate if an article is from an academic journal.

Search Ulrichsweb to check if a journal is peer-reviewed. The term they use for peer-reviewed is 'refereed' that is designated by this symbol:

Ulrichsweb This link opens in a new window
Search by ISSN, subject, publisher, or language. Over 300,000 journals with 900 subject specialties.
Provides data points such as ISSN, publisher, language, subject, abstracting & indexing coverage, full-text database coverage, tables of contents, and reviews written by librarians. You can narrow OA results by clicking on the "Open Access" option. OA journals are also indicated with the bright blue "unlocked" icon.

Journals: How to Locate Top Journals in Your Discipline
So many scholarly journals! How can you tell which ones are the best?

Popular Magazine vs. Scholarly Journal: Handout

Here is a handout which may help you distinguish academic/scholarly journals from popular magazines.

Distinguishing Magazines and Scholarly Journals
A brief guide to help tell the difference between magazines and journals.

Journal Citation Reports

Journal Citation Reports® offers a systematic, objective means to critically evaluate the world's leading journals, with quantifiable, statistical information based on citation data. By compiling articles' cited references, JCR helps to measure research influence and impact at the journal and category levels, and shows the relationship between citing and cited journals (from the publisher's website).

Journal Citation Reports This link opens in a new window
JRC is a tool to evaluate and compare journals using citation data drawn from approximately 12,000 scholarly and technical journals.

Use this special Journal Citation Report Manuscript Match Put in your abstract and find journals suitable to publish in. You must setup an individual JRC account first.