Refereed Journals

The terms "refereed" and "peer reviewed" mean essentially the same thing.  In The Oxford English Dictionary, "peer review" is defined as the process by which a learned journal passes a paper received for publication to outside experts for their comments on its suitability and worth; refereeing.

To identify scholarly journals which are refereed:

• Ulrich's International Periodicals Directory, available as a WebLUIS database,  is a unique, current, comprehensive and continuously updated source of information on selected periodicals and serials published in the United States and throughout the world. The Advanced Search screen allows you to limit Document Type to "Academic/Scholarly Publication" and Special Features to "Refereed".

Some of the databases which allow you to limit your search to refereed or peer reviewed journals are:

• EBSCOhost (multidisciplinary)
• InfoTrac (multidisciplinary) 
• ProQuest (business and criminal justice)
• CINAHL (nursing & allied health) - select "Peer Reviewed" in the Journal Subset Phrase dropdown box. Other options include "blind peer reviewed", "double blind peer reviewed", "editorial board reviewed" and "expert peer reviewed".

You may find that most or all of the journals included in a particular database are scholarly, refereed journals, so that proper selection of the database may automatically eliminate the less scholarly sources. A few examples are:

• JSTOR (multidisciplinary)
• Science Direct (multidisciplinary)
• Project MUSE (humanities, social sciences, mathematics)
• PsycINFO (psychology)
• Web of Science (multidisciplinary)
• Cambridge Scientific Abstracts (multidisciplinary) 

Last modified: November 13, 2001
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~rgause/misc/refereed.htm