What's in this article:
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Information on peer-reviewed articles. What they are and why they matter.
Who cares:
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Anyone looking for legitimate academic sources.
While nearly all of the journals collected in JSTOR are peer-reviewed publications, our archives do contain some specific primary materials (like some journals in the Ireland Collection and the 19th Century British Pamphlet Collection).
Also, some journal content is much older than today's standard peer-review process. This means that, though all the information in JSTOR is held to a scholarly standard, not all of the publications are technically "peer-reviewed." At the current time there is no way to search JSTOR for only peer-reviewed publications. We often find that if you have questions concerning the academic legitimacy of a particular journal or book, your institution's librarian or your course instructor may be best able to answer those inquiries.
Comments
3 comments
I can't think of a single reason not to feature an option to search peer reviewed material or at minimum mark items that are.
Hi Ryan! This was an intentional decision, but I'm going to reach out to my colleagues to find out information beyond this article for you. I'll update soon!
Hi Ryan! From our content management team:
Often, we don’t know the peer review status of individual articles, so it’s just not feasible for us to have a filtered search on the article level.
Putting labels on the issue level could be misleading as well as since not all contents within the issue will be peer-reviewed. For instance, some include editorials and commentaries. On the journal level, as the help text indicates, there is older content within the same publication that may not be peer reviewed in the standard process, and we wouldn’t be able to accurately reflect information about changes to a journal’s peer review process.
Additionally, going back in time--scholarly, highly-vetted, but older materials may be of an excellent standard for their time, but they were not subjected to a peer-review process.
I hope this helps! Thanks for your patience as we found an answer for you, but let me know if I can be of further assistance.
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