Peer review has been a fundamental part of scholarly journals since their inception. It is the process of subjecting an author's manuscript (article) to scrutiny by others who are considered to be experts in that particular subject field, prior to its publication.
The role of the publishers is to manage and support this process, much heavy lifting is performed by unpaid academic scholars who act as editors, members of editorial boards and referees (peers).
Peer review involves:
1. Review of the submitted manuscript by journal editorial staff to make sure that the work fits into the journal's scope and meets its standards as to format, research ethics, research methodology, etc.
2. Editors then select reviewers who using a double-blind process, assess manuscript for quality and make recommendations to the editor regarding the acceptance of the work for publication, required revisions or rejection of the work. It is during this process they:
3. The Journal editor (and quite often the journal editorial board) makes the final decision to publish a submitted work. For an in-depth discussion of the peer review process see The STM Report: An overview of the scientific and scholarly publishing pp. 47 - 57.
Authors of articles attach great importance to the peer review process because of how it assists them in improving the quality of their papers. The peer review process also provided a mechanism for identifying plagiarism.
Ultimately to you, as a reader, the peer review's greatest value is found in the "central pillar of trust" that the process imparts into the article's trustworthiness - it provides a degree of certainty about the quality of the product.
Nicholas, D., Watkinson, A., Jamali, H. R., Herman, E., Tenopir, C., Volentine, R., Allard, S., & Levine, K. (2015). Peer review: still king in the digital age. Learned Publishing, 28(1), 15–21. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lxh&AN=100007441&site=eds-live&scope=site&custid=s5672116&authtype=sso
How to create a THESIS STATEMENT.
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8 peer reviewed sources needed
Use the link (above) to search for peer reviewed articles.
After entering your search terms and doing a search - LOOK on the LEFT to LIMIT to Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals and Full Text.
EXAMPLE:
The article presents one of the main findings of an international study of 4,000 academic researchers that examined how trustworthiness is determined in the digital environment when it comes to scholarly reading, citing, and publishing. The study shows that peer review is still the most trustworthy characteristic of all. There is, though, a common perception that open access journals are not peer reviewed or do not have proper peer-review systems. Researchers appear to have moved inexorably from a print-based system to a digital system, but it has not significantly changed the way they decide what to trust. They do not trust social media. Only a minority - although significantly mostly young and early career researchers - thought that social media are anything other than more appropriate to personal interactions and peripheral to their professional/academic lives. There are other significant differences, according to the age of the researcher. Thus, in regard to choosing an outlet for publication of their work, young researchers are much less concerned with the fact that it is peer reviewed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
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