I'm searching for peer-reviewed articles for an assignment in my Rush University course. Can the library help me with this?
Answer
The best way to get assistance with searching for articles is to make an appointment with one of our librarians, which you can do by filling out our Ask a Question form.
If you are unable to schedule an appointment, we do have other resources available that can assist you with refining your search. Our Boolean searching guide covers how to build a complex and efficient search strategy to pull up relevant articles across databases. We also have guides for individual databases, such as PubMed, CINHAL, and Scopus. Scopus can be especially useful for going through citations, which is a good way to not only find more relevant articles, but also to confirm that you have not missed any major articles.
If you're not sure whether an article you're looking at is from a peer-reviewed journal or not, the best way to determine this is actually to visit the journal's website – peer-reviewed journals will always have a section on the peer-review process that is easy to find (you can see an example on JAMA's wesbite). Keep in mind, however, that not all types of articles are peer-reviewed – an editorial, for example, may not be peer-reviewed. However, this will also generally be noted in a journal's information for authors section.
