Super Glossary

Peer-Reviewed Journal

Entertainment / Literature / Peer-Reviewed Journal: Also called a refereed journal, a juried publication, a scholarly journal, or a critical journal, a peer-reviewed journal is a periodical publication with strict standards for accuracy and clear thinking. Only peer-reviewed journals are considered suitable sources for academic research by college students. Most are published two to four times a year. These publications are held in such high esteem because, when an article is submitted for publication, it is passed on to two or three other experts in the field, they in turn critique the author's thinking and check the article's claims and facts to make sure it is as accurate as possible and (theoretically) free from distorting political, religious, ideological bias, citation errors, logical fallacies, and misattributions. This contrasts with a book, in which only a copy-editor or two will check for typos, but nobody challenges the author's ideas, and it contrasts even more starkly with a web page like this one, in which no official structure is consistently available to ensure scholarly accuracy let alone find all the typos. Good college students learn to use peer-reviewed journals, they do not rely on Google and web-browsing for their primary information. Some of the most important peer-reviewed journals for medieval literature students in English include The Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Medievalia et Humanistica, Medium Aevum, Arthuriana, Medieval Studies, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, the PMLA, Philological Quarterly, Reading Medieval Studies, Speculum, Chaucer Review, and Studies in the Age of Chaucer. The tell-tale signs of a scholarly journal are its typically copious footnotes, the absence of advertisements or glossy photographs, often its plain, unadorned cover, its guidelines in the back or front for scholarly submissions, and its pages, which are typically on expensive acid-free paper to ensure archival survival. Often libraries do have these journals available in electronic databases (such as JSTOR) that can be searched as easily and as efficiently as webpages, so students have no excuse for not using them. If you need help, contact your teacher or a reference librarian. Bribe this helper with chocolate.
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