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Education - Educator Cafe & Field Courses

Best Databases for Education Research

Start Here to Search for Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles

More Databases for Education Research

Complete List of Databases

See a Full List of Available Databases

Suggested Journals

Research-focused Journals in Education

Notes: This is not a complete list. Look for a search icon or a "Search within this publication" option to research a topic while limiting the results to the specific journal.

Scholarly Peer Review

Why Does My Professor Require Peer Reviewed Sources?

Peer review is the rigorous process scholarly resources go through to become published. Most often when we talk about peer review, we are talking about journal articles going through the process, but some books do also. Peer review typically involves review boards of experts in a topic or discipline who read and evaluate submitted articles/materials to determine if they meet the standards for publication. This review involves more than just looking at the article's format, rather also examining thoroughness of the literature review, soundness of methodology, accuracy of results, and logic behind conclusions that are drawn. Often articles are returned to the authors for revisions before final publication.  

  • For a clever video explanation of peer review, see NC State University Library's Peer Review in 3 Minutes (video)
  • Remember that when using many library article databases, during your search you can limit your results to only Peer reviewed (Scholarly) articles by simply checking a box.

screenshot showing checkbox to indicate scholarly (peer reviewed) articles in a search

Setting up Google Scholar

Connecting A&M-SA Library to Google Scholar

  1. Go to the Google Scholar home page.
  2. Click on the three horizontal lines in the upper left corner of the screen to open a menu of options.
  3. Click on Settings, the last item (labeled with a gear icon) in the list.
  4. Click on Library links in the list of options.
  5. In the blank search box, enter Texas A&M University-San Antonio.
  6. Select Texas A&M University-San Antonio - Find It @ A&M-SA! from the dropdown menu of options. Also select Open WorldCat - Library Search.
  7. Click Save. If you have cookies enabled, the settings should hold for future searches using Google Scholar.

The images below show the steps