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Applied Research for Students

What are scholarly and peer reviewed articles?

Scholarly sources are books, articles, websites, or individual papers that are published by academics, organizations, agencies, or governmental departments. They are sometimes (but not always) peer reviewed. (Grey literature is an example of a type of scholarly source that is not peer reviewed.)

Peer reviewed articles are scholarly sources. Peer reviewed articles are published in scholarly, peer reviewed journals and are usually either:

  • original research articles that typically follow a consistent format (with sections such as Abstract, Introduction, Methods, Results, etc.) or
  • review articles (e.g., literature reviews, meta-analyses, systematic reviews, etc.)

Example of the peer review process:

Steps outlined in the peer reviewed process

How to find peer reviewed articles

For a quick overview of peer reviewed articles, watch the video below:

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