I touched on this a little bit in the blog about a good research article and upon a suggestion from someone else decided to add a bit more about peer reviewed articles, what they are and why they are so important.
A peer reviewed journal article is basically what it sounds like, an article published in a journal that has been reviewed by a group of experts (peers) within your field of research.
The job of these experts is to analyze your your research, data and results to determine whether or not you've provided a sound study. This is an important process when it comes to research as these people are supposed to be determining whether or not you've made any mistakes in your research, done your stats wrong, were unethical, etc. If they determine you have a sound study they will then give it the thumbs up to be published.
Scientific journals are where these studies are going to be published, some are going to be better than others, but basically they will contain a set of their reviewed research papers for other people interested to read. These are not the same thing as magazine articles or articles published to the internet that rely on the writer to determine whether or not their research was sound.
Some journals you might see:
Journal of Medicinal Chemistry
Chemical Reviews
Journal of Psychiatry and Neuroscience
The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition
and more may be found here:
http://www.eurekalert.org/links.php?jrnl=A
While the peer review process is not fail safe and bad articles can get through they can at least ensure that an expert in the field other than the writer or researcher of the article has taken a look at the article and determined they approve of the research and findings.
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Wikipedia is actually a strange (and granted, not always entirely accurate) example of this. I'm not saying to put 100% stock in any given fact you read in an article there, but it's a great starting point for research, and the context behind any particular controversial fact can often be understood by looking at the discussion page.
ReplyDeleteI agree, it had its shaky starts, but i've found the information to be fairly accurate there. A lot of what isn't is marked as such. The bonus is that they have all their resources cited just in case someone would like to double check.
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