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.
An article that is "peer-reviewed" refers to articles that have undergone a rigorous review process, often including revisions to the original manuscript, by peers in their discipline, before publication in a scholarly journal. Other ways to describe a peer-reviewed article include: empirical studies, review articles, scholarly articles, academic articles, or research articles.
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.
The video below describes some tips for identifying if a journal is predatory. While the video mentions open access journals specific, do be aware that journals with traditional publication models can also be predatory. In addition, there are many high quality open access journals out there too, especially in biology!
