In this guide, you'll everything you should know about peer reviewed articles.
To begin with, writing a research project isn’t difficult, but it can be resource intensive, incredibly demanding, and overall time-consuming.
You have to do more than just finding a suitable topic and coming up with a specific question to investigate.
Notably, your professor will ask you to use peer-reviewed articles in your work.
But what are peer-reviewed articles exactly and why do we use them in our research paper writing service?
In this guide, you’ll learn everything you should know about peer-reviewed articles. In particular, you learn:
- What peer-reviewed articles are
- The difference between a review article and a research paper
- Types of peer review articles and
- The benefits and drawbacks of peer reviews
In short, if you’re looking for a complete guide that discusses peer-reviewed articles in details, you will find this post incredibly useful.
What Are Peer Reviewed Article?
A peer-reviewed article refers to a scholarly journal independently assessed by referees for validity, significance, and originality.
Research experts consider the peer review process as a form of quality control for academic journals, and one that provides solid feedback that authors can use to improve the quality of their research papers before official publication.
More often than not, an author will engage in dialogues with their peers from which they receive constructive criticism and support to improve their work.
Despite the constraints involved in the peer review process, and the overall flaws the phase tends to have, peer review helps to uphold the highest standards in scholarly communication.
What’s more, the process ensures research experts uphold quality of individual journals while offering the best academic support to authors of such work.
With respect to accuracy, authors can’t be 100% certain about the accuracy and currency of their scholarly work.
Therefore, the peer review process can help you to identify gaps or errors that you may have overlooked when doing your research.
With these gaps (or errors) identified and fixed, the final article tends to be better than the original document.
Types of Peer Review Articles
There are five types of peer-reviewed articles, and they’re as follows:
1. Single Anonymous Peer Review
In a single blind peer review, the reviewers know the identity of the author but the author has no clue who the independent reviewers are.
Given the anonymity of the team reviewing the journal article, it’s possible for the team to give honest and truthful feedback without worrying about what the author will think.
The advantage of this type of peer review is that a team of referees tends to offer honest feedback on the paper, especially since they’re wholly anonymous throughout the process.
However, the problem with single anonymous review is that it has the potential to focus more on the author of the article rather than the article itself.
There is also the potential risk of unconscious biasness, where a reviewer might make judgment on the paper based on the details they have about the author, and unfortunately do so even without realizing.
2. Double Anonymous Peer Review
In a double blind peer review, reviewers don’t know who the author of a journal article is and the author doesn’t know who the reviewers are.
Quite common in social sciences and humanities, the double anonymous review tends to give a journal a better review and often avoids the risk of the paper getting intentional or unintentional biasness.
The overall benefit of a double anonymous peer review is that reviewers don’t have the opportunity to offer conscious or unconscious biasness on the author’s research work.
Also, it gives the referees more confidence in their work since there won’t be any criticism coming from the author.
Still, there at least two problems with this type of review.
First, the anonymity of an author isn’t 100% a guarantee. Second, some reviewers can take advantage of their anonymity and write bad, biased, rude, or unfair reviews that don’t reflect the quality of an author’s work.
3. Open Peer Review
In this case, both the author and the reviewers know one another, or at least their identities become known at some point in time in the review process.
In rare cases, this type of peer review may require the inclusion of the names of the reviewer as well as their report of the article.
The benefit of an open peer review is that it ensures an author gets more polite and constructive comments, which can help them to improve their research.
Also, it gives readers the opportunity to read detailed reviews and therefore increasing the trustworthiness of the research work.
On the downside, many reviewers tend to oblige to do this kind of review because they don’t want their names published under their report.
In addition, there’s the possibility of giving unreliable review because the referees know the author and may not want to offend them.
4. Post Publication Peer Review
A post-publication peer review can take two routes.
The first possibility is that it might go through one of the review options we’ve shared.
The other option is you may get the work published immediately after some basic checks.
Once published, there will be an invitation to readers and referees to read the article and give their comment or review on the work.
The best thing about this type of peer review is that it makes it easy to gather a wider range of perspective on a paper. The additional comments reflect new ideas, which can add value to the article, particularly in future studies.
Unfortunately, it’s difficult to guarantee that papers, which receive this kind of treatment will receive reviews. Also, papers that address controversial issues may attract hundreds of mixed comment, which don’t often get a moderation.
5. Registered Reports
In a registered report, referees do the first round of peer review after a researcher designs their study.
With the feedback from the process, an author gets valuable feedback on the experiments they’d like to test and the question they wish to answer.