It is important to evaluate information sources for credibility, accuracy, and overall scientific quality prior to including them in your research. The peer review process acts as a safeguard against the publication of poor quality studies, but this process is imperfect and peer reviewers occasionally miss things. In addition, not all academic journals have high editorial standards. For this reason, we cannot assume that every article that has been published in a scientific journal is high quality.
You should read each article you encounter with a skeptical eye. Pretend that you're a peer reviewer and ask questions such as the following:
In addition to evaluating the quality of the study, you should consider how each article fits in to the context of your own research. Does it help you determine a hypothesis? Is it giving you new ideas about experimental methods to use? Does it explain or contextualize the results you obtained in lab? Think about how the article relates to your own project as you decide where (ie: which section) / how to incorporate it into your own paper.
The video below explains how you can evaluate a scientific research article to determine if it is a high quality source that is appropriate to cite in your own research. A word document version of this same content is also linked below.
Peer review is a process that most scholarly articles go through prior to publication. When authors submit their research to an academic journal, that journal's editorial board will send it along to peer reviewers, who are other researchers that are knowledgeable about the topic that the article is about. The reviewers read it and leave comments on the overall quality of the article. Then, the authors will usually have the opportunity to make revisions to the article based on these comments, resubmit, and hopefully get published.
The video below from North Carolina State University is a 3 minute overview of the peer review process.
