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Reading & Literacy Research Guide

Start Here for Education Research!

Start Here to Find Journals for Education Research

Best Databases for Reading Research

Other Useful Databases for Reading Research 

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

Suggested Journals

Here are direct links to some good journals for research in reading and education. 

Search within a Publication

Need an Article from a Specific Journal? 

You can often enter a keyword search from the journal's home page within a database. Follow the steps and see the images below for visual examples. Note: The example shown in the images below is a sports science journal but the concepts apply for any journal.

  1. Use the Find a Specific Journal Tool or a list of suggested journals on a Research Guide to get to the home page for the journal.
  2. Look for a link stating Search within this publication or a search box that is similarly labeled.
  3. Add keywords or search phrases which describe your topic to the blank search boxes.
  4. Click search to find articles on the topic that have been published in the specific journal you are searching.

Note: These specific instructions apply to EBSCO databases. If the journal is housed in a ProQuest, SAGE, or other company's database, the screens will look different from the examples which follow (Steps 3 and 4).

Topic Search within a Specific Journal

1. Locate the journal homepage using Find a Specific Journal Tool

Use the list of suggested journals or the Find a Specific Journal Tool on the Library's home page, to locate the journal home page from within the library databases.

2. Journal of Sport Behavior result page from WorldCat Library Catalog search

When the result page for the journal appears in WorldCat (the library catalog) it will show you which database(s) includes coverage of the journal. Click on the link for the journal title to open the record page for the journal within the database.

3. Record page for Journal of Sport Behavior as it appears in the SPORTDiscus (EBSCO) database

The journal record page offers important information about the journal, and in this case, offers links to all the issues of the journal, organized by year, in a vertical list on the right side of the screen. Above the Publication Details heading, there is also a link labeled "Search within this publication." Clicking here will open up a page with the advanced search screen for the database.

4. Advanced Search page with JN "Journal of Sport Behavior" entered in top search box

The Journal Name (JN) symbol is automatically entered into the first search box. You can then use the other empty search boxes to enter keywords or other search terms to describe your topic. Your results will be limited to matching articles from the specific journal, in this case, Journal of Sport Behavior.