Peer Review: Journal Articles

Peer Review Limitations:

The quality of information provided by peer-reviewed articles tends to be high. That's why you're often asked to find them for your academic research projects! However, these aren't necessarily the best types of sources in every situation. Peer-reviewed articles have limitations in some scenarios, including: 

Research projects that focus on a current event.

Because these articles go through such a rigorous review process, it can take months or years from the time an article is complete for it to be published, making it almost impossible to find a peer-reviewed article that refers to that specific event. You can be creative if you are required to find peer-reviewed articles in this scenarios, though. For example, if you're doing a research project on the rhetorical strategies used by candidates in a current political election, you can search for peer-reviewed articles that deal with how these strategies have been used in other political campaigns and draw connections between those examples and your own. This requires you to spend some time thinking about what your research project is really about, which is also helpful to your research process overall! If you're really wanting to discuss political rhetoric in campaigns, including current or recent ones, you can use peer-reviewed articles on the political rhetoric piece and bring them up to date with more recent accounts from newspapers, magazines, or other current sources. 

Research projects that require you to include basic background information on a topic.

If you're researching diabetes and you need to include some basic information about the symptoms of the disease, peer-reviewed articles probably won't help you very much. As the video you watched a few minutes ago indicated, peer-reviewed articles "focus on narrow, precise topics." Authors of these sources typically assume that you already know the basic background information on the topic. 

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