How do I find Peer-reviewed articles?
My professor said I needed to use peer-reviewed articles. How do I find them?
Answer
MCPHS Smart Search and most of our databases include peer-reviewed articles. Start with one of these quick strategies:
- Wherever you're searching, check for a peer review limit that you can check off to limit your search results to just stuff from peer reviewed journals. (Most but not all databases have this option.)
- When you find a potential article, make sure that it's really an article rather than an editorial, book review, letter to the editor, or some other unsupported opinion piece.
Use the Finding Peer-reviewed Sources Guide for more detailed search and evaluation strategies, including:
- which databases only have peer-reviewed articles
- which databases have both peer-reviewed articles and non-peer-reviewed articles
- how to tell if an article you have already found is peer-reviewed