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Early Childhood Education Research Guide

Best Bets Early Childhood

Searching for Peer-reviewed Articles: Start Here!

More Databases for Education Research

See a Full List of Available Databases

Reading Strategies for Journal Articles

How to Read Scholarly Journal Articles

If you have had little or no experience reading scholarly (academic) journal articles, reading this type of literature can be intimidating at first. See the resources below for suggested effective strategies.

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