Research for Writers: How to Find Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles

Welcome to Teach Write! This column draws on my 20 years’ experience teaching writing to kids, university students, and adult learners. It includes ideas and exercises that teachers and students can use in the classroom, and creative writers can use to level up their process.

Last time we compared primary and secondary sources and talked about how to use them when researching writing assignments or creative projects. Today, we’re getting a bit more practical, with some tips for finding and accessing peer-reviewed journal articles, the gold-standard of primary sources. But first…

What IS Peer Review Anyway?

You know how factories have quality control systems in place to ensure that their products meet a certain standard before being offered to customers? Peer-review is quality control for knowledge. It’s a way of ensuring that the new facts and ideas that are produced during research are as accurate and trustworthy as possible, BEFORE they make it into print. Here’s the short version:

Researchers submit a paper describing their work to a professional journal
The editor sends the paper to 2-5 other researchers who are working in the same field
Those experts (the peers of the original researchers) review the paper for errors, flawed logic, bad research practices, alternative possibilities that should have been considered but weren’t, and anything else they think isn’t up to scratch
The authors of the paper have to make every single change the reviewers suggest, OR come up with really good reasons why not
If the editor believes the paper has improved enough, it will be published

It’s an extensive, time-consuming, chocolate-binge-inducing process* and it doesn’t always work… but it’s the best method yet invented for vetting new knowledge. This quality control process is the reason that journal articles are often considered even better sources of information than other primary sources, like interviews.**

Now that we know WHAT peer-reviewed articles are, let’s talk about how to get them. There are two methods, depending on whether or not you have access to a university library. We’ll start with “yes I do” and go from there.

Accessing Journal Articles Using University Libraries

First things first, you need to find yourself a database – a searchable digital index that includes information on articles from a whole whack of different journals. If you’re researching in the STEM fields, you want Web of Science. It is hands down the best source for science and technology. For other fields, ask the reference librarian to recommend a good database.

Reference librarians: best friends of both students and professional writers. Also, they are usually bored, so take them your questions and you’ll make their day.

Most databases will let you search by title, author, or keyword, depending on where you are in the process. Try a range of different keywords related to your topic, because you might get different results. If you need help navigating the database, who will you ask? That’s right, the reference librarian.