Who Decides What Is Valid? The Peer Review Process

Who Decides What Is Valid? The Peer Review Process

Terms and concepts to know for this lesson:

Manuscript - original text of an author's work prior to submission to a publisher for consideration. What an article looks like before it's edited and becomes an article.

Peer Review (scholarly) - comprehensive process where other experts in a field evaluating the quality of a manuscript and determine if the manuscript is suitable for publication in a journal. Quality control for academic publications.

So, About Scholarly Sources

In the previous section What is a "Good" Source? Determining the Validity of Evidence, you learned that scholarly sources can be a valuable type of evidence to use when creating a research assignment, because they are written by experts. However, not every scholarly source is made equally. Confused? Think of it like this - some movies are better than other movies, right? For example, a film like The Godfather is generally regarded as a higher quality film than The Godfather Part III.

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Above images used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.

The term scholarly is not necessarily an indication of high quality; rather, scholarly refers to the writers intended audience. A scholarly source could be written by an expert and for other experts, yet still be poorly written or based on poorly conducted research. Just like how a movie with The Godfather in the title isn't necessarily a great movie.

Peer Review, or, Quality Control in Academic Writing

Below you'll learn more about how peer review actually works. Don't feel like reading? Check out this video from NCSU Libraries Links to an external site., which will cover the same material in about three minutes.

Most scholarly, trade, and popular sources use editors to decide which submitted manuscripts are worthy of publication. In popular sources, editors are not necessarily experts in all of the fields their publications cover. For example, an editor for a newspaper cannot possibly be a subject expert on all of the topics that his or her reporters will want to cover. For an editor working in an unfamiliar subject area, it can be challenging to determine the validity of a submitted manuscript.

This challenge can be even more daunting within scholarly journals, which write on very specific topics in high levels of detail; determining whether a scholarly article is worthy of publication would be impossible for a non-expert. Many scholarly journals address this issue of editor expertise by using a process called peer review. Scholarly journals that use this editorial process are called peer reviewed scholarly journals.

When a peer reviewed scholarly journal receives a manuscript for consideration, the editor of the journal sends the manuscript out to other experts in the field, who then perform a thorough examination of the manuscript. Reviewers examine which sources the manuscript referred to, the research methodology utilized, as well as the soundness of any conclusions. Reviewers can accept an article, reject an article, or conditionally accept an article if certain changes are made.

As a result, peer review effectively works as quality control within academia, ensuring that journals only publish manuscripts that have been verified as valid by other experts in the field. This means that articles published within a peer reviewed scholarly journal make for very strong evidence in a research assignment. Not sure if the journal your article is from is peer reviewed? Search Google for the title of the journal, or ask a librarian. Links to an external site.   

Conclusion

Using peer reviewed sources can help ensure that you are using credible evidence to support your argument. Also, if Hollywood worked under peer review, we would probably see less terrible sequels like The Godfather Part III.