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Biology Research: Evaluation

Overview of how to find recent scholarly journal articles in the biological sciences.

Evaluation

For the purposes of your Biology Literature review, you will want to focus exclusively on scholarly or peer reviewed journal articles.

 

What are "peer reviewed articles"?
Generally speaking, these are articles written by experts in their field.  These articles are reviewed and scrutinized by other experts in the same field (peers) before the article is accepted for publication.  The idea is that only the best, most scholarly information is presented in these kinds of articles.

Please note: both ScienceDirect and EBSCOhost indicate 'peer reviewed' where appropriate and limiters are available in EBSCOhost to select only peer reviewed.  Generally, limiting to Article type in ScienceDirect also produces peer reviewed results. 
Helpful information on deciphering exactly what kind of article you have appears below:

 

CRAAPP Test for articles:

Use this handy tool to evaluate your article. http://www.bucks.edu/media/bcccmedialibrary/library/pdf/CRAAPP-for-articles-II.pdf

Remember--the databases may indicate a journal, e.g.: Nature, is peer-reviewed, but that editorial or news article published in Nature is not peer reviewed. Only the research articles are peer-reviewed.

 

Digital Resources Librarian

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Brian Johnstone
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