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William Molnar

The Importance of Peer-Review of Scholarly Journals

By:

William Molnar

It is very important for a researcher to understand the importance of peer-review of scholarly

journals especially to a scholar-practitioner. Scholarly journals differ from other articles such as

substantive, popular and sensational articles. According to the Olin Uris Libraries at

www.library.cornell.edu/olinuris/ref/research/skill20.html, a scholarly journal is supported by

three basic elements;” 1) they are concerned with academic study, especially research, 2) exhibit

the methods and attitudes of a scholar, and 3) have the manner and appearance of a scholar.” (pg.

1). The scholarly journal is important to the scholar-practitioner because it will contain a

citation. This short citation will give the reader a basic background of the article including the

title, author, date, and the source of the information. In addition to the citation is the abstract.

Abstracts are extremely useful to the scholar-practitioner because it provides a summary of an

article’s contents and sometime include search results. Some peer-review will contain the full

text , one that can be read immediately online. If a full text is available, there will be a symbol

showing that full text is available.

The two articles that I downloaded are indeed peer-reviewed articles. Here is how I was able to

define my articles as peer reviewed. To begin with “Most scholarly journals can be identified

easily if it contains an abstract, a descriptive summary of the article before the main text. In

addition, Scholarly journals have a serious look, contain many graphs and charts but very few

pictures. Scholarly journals will always cite their sources in the form of footnotes or
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William Molnar

bibliography. The bibliographies are rather lengthy and cite other scholarly writings for further

research. Articles are written by a scholar in the field or by someone who has done extensive

research in the field. The language of a scholarly journal is of the discipline covered. It is

assumed there is some scholarly background with regards to the reader. The main purpose of a

scholarly journal is to report on original research in order to make information available to the

rest of the scholarly world. “(Pg. 2 of the aforementioned website).

There are steps a researcher can follow to decide the validity of a journal article. The first step is

pre-evaluation. The researcher needs to ask himself what he is looking for. Is he looking for

facts, opinions, statistics, narratives, descriptions? What is the purpose of the research? Is it to

get new ideas or support a position? Is it to survey an opinion The second step is to select

sources likely to be reliable. The researcher needs to ask himself “What source or what kind of

source would be the most credible for providing information in this particular case? On the

website http://www.virtualsalt.com/evalu8it.htm, the researcher can find all the information

needed to define a piece of work as credible and validated. The website discusses the CARS

checklist for Information Quality (Crediblity, Author’s credentials, Evidence of Quality Control,

and metainformation. By reviewing this website, it will help prepare the researcher to the steps

needed to test the validity of an article.