Checking if an article is peer-reviewed

hannesofiero
Hi,
I'm doing my thesis and am using Zotero to organize my references. I was wondering if there is a function in Zotero for checking whether a research article is peer-reviewed? I have heard about such a function in EndNote. This would save me a lot of time - not having to go and check every journal and so on manually.

And if yes, where do I find this function and how do I use it? :-)

Thanks in advance!
  • bwiernik
    This is generally something that varies across journals rather than individual articles. So, you will want to investigate the reputation of the journals you are importing items from to see if they are regarded as a legitimate journal.

    Note also that you shouldn’t look at “peer reviewed” as a reliable indicator that a paper is good quality or reliable. Peer review rarely deeply proves the methods or data of a paper, so it is not a good defense against fraud, data manipulation, poor analyses, or invalid conclusions. You should regard “peer reviewed” as indicating “2-4 people have read some part of this paper” and little more.
  • DWL-SDCA
    The quality of "peer review" varies greatly across journals -- even within some of the old standard publishers. Most of the predatory publishers claim to peer review the manuscripts they receive but at the same time claim that articles will be published in a few days. Clearly, many articles -- even from journals that have existed for decades have not undergone even basic copy-editing with recent changes in the editorial boards. I see articles with obvious typos (teh), misspellings, homophone misuse (their/there), and preposterous logical fallacies. The last time I looked, EndNote simply echos the publishers' claims. They are in good company. PubMed claims to only index articles from peer-reviewed journals but allows the journal to define "peer review". Similarly, the database I curate follows the publishers' claims but we warn our users that "peer review" is no longer a standard with a reliable quality threshold. Remember, a database provides an index to the literature. There is value in including poor research (especially if the results are in the news media) to allow the excrement to be refuted.

    Even Brandon's "2 to 4 people have read" indicator is not necessarily true for some publishers. It is a sad situation. Google: "predatory publishers" and "Beall's List".

    As a graduate student you yourself should be expected to be capable of easily differentiating the garbage from the acceptable. You should be learning to gain the capacity to assess the good from the acceptable. There is no shortcut to this intellectual effort. Learning to discern is part of the challenge -- the fun -- of graduate school.
  • hannesofiero
    Hi,
    Thank you for the initial responses to my question.

    To clarify, I am trying to narrow down a large searches and want to use "peer-reviewed" yes/no as one criteria for further inclusion in my search, as this is a requirement from my supervisor. Don't worry, I will still be taking part in the "challenge and fun of graduate school", looking critically at the quality of each article after I have narrowed down the amount of articles to an appropriate number based on different criteria.

    Do any of you have an answer to my question about Zotero?

    Best regards

  • bwiernik
    Zotero doesn’t have such a feature.

    If this is for a systematic review, I would really strongly encourage you not to apply such a filter. Publication bias is a serious threat to the validity of systematic reviews, and applying a publication filter like that exacerbates the problem.
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