Articles published in peer-reviewed or refereed journals have been through a formal approval process. An editor and one or more subject specialists review the article before it is accepted for publication. This process is intended to ensure that the article is accurate, well-researched, and contributes to the body of knowledge in the field.

While most databases offer a peer-review limiter, Ulrichsweb Global Periodicals Directory is the best place to confirm the peer-review status of a journal. This is because Ulrichsweb isn't like most databases - instead of collecting articles, Ulrichsweb is a specialised database that collects information about journals.

You can access this database from the Library's list of U-databases

To check if an article comes from a peer reviewed journal:

• Search for the journal title (not the article title) or the journal ISSN
• Locate the journal on the results list
• If there is a referee's jumper () in the column on the left it means the journal (and therefore the article) is peer reviewed. In the United States of America they refer to the peer review process as refereeing, hence the referee's jumper.

If you searched by journal title, you may get more than one result for the same journal. This sometimes indicates that there is both a hard copy and an electronic copy of this journal.

If you are unsure, you can always go back to the article record from your original search and get the journal's ISSN number from there. The ISSN is a unique number that is delegated to each journal.

Note that only the scholarly articles in a peer-reviewed journal will have been peer-reviewed. Other documents such as book reviews and opinion pieces will not have been peer-reviewed, and would not be considered "academic quality".