OSU Libraries

By checking a couple of boxes on a search form, you can improve your odds of finding the sources  that will work for an assignment requiring "peer-reviewed" or "scholarly" articles.

This trick won't guarantee that you find scholarly articles, but it will improve your odds by filtering out a lot of sources that are clearly not scholarly.

From the library homepage, choose Databases from the Quicklinks list.

 

 

This will work in most EBSCOhost databases.  If you are not sure which one you want to use, Academic Search Premier is almost always a good starting place.

 

 

Do a search on your topic.  TIP:  use just 1-2 important keywords.  Don't limit your results too much by adding too many search terms.

At this point, you might want to try a couple of different sets of keywords to see which one gets you the best results.  If you don't have enough results, try eliminating keywords.

Once you have a decent set of results, set your limits to get rid of the non-scholarly sources:

 

 

On the right side of the screen, you should see these two ticky boxes:

• * Scholarly (peer-reviewed) journals
• * References Available

Check both of these boxes.  The first one will limit to journals EBSCO thinks are peer-reviewed or scholarly.  The second one will limit to articles that have bibliographies available.

Here's the same search, with those limits attached.  Notice that the total number of results decreases from 786 to 64.

 

 

If you aren't sure how to get to the article from the results list - help is here.

I can't emphasize this enough, though - everything that is published in a peer-reviewed journal is not  peer-reviewed.  In addition to peer-reviewed, research-based articles, journals provide book reviews, website reviews,  editorials and opinion columns.  These might be useful for your work, but they aren't considered "peer-reviewed" articles.

If you're not sure if a particular article is peer-reviewed, that 's a great question to ask your professor or a librarian.