Look up the number of times an article has been cited using cited reference searching.
Determine the impact factor for a journal using the Journal Citation Reports.
Not all journal articles are created equal. Know how to tell them apart.
Peer-review is a process by which journal articles, prior to being accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal, are reviewed and commented on by experts in the field. If an article has been peer-reviewed, it has passed a minimum standard of quality as determined by the article author’s (or authors’) peers. Most, but not all, content in a peer-reviewed journal has been peer-reviewed. Visit the guide on how to tell if a journal is peer-reviewed for more information. If you are still unsure about whether a particular article has been peer-reviewed, please contact a librarian or your professor.
Check out this video by Western Libraries for an overview of the peer-review process.
Though the terms “scholarly” and “peer-reviewed” are often used interchangeably, they have slightly different meanings. Content can be scholarly without having been peer-reviewed. Scholarly content is written by experts on their topic of expertise, but it may or may not have been peer-reviewed. For example, letters to the editor appearing in a peer-reviewed journal are typically written by experts but are not peer-reviewed. Note that “academic” and “scholarly” are synonyms.