Psychology: Journals

Scholarly (or Academic) Journals are:

• Scholarly and about academic disciplines 
• Often published by university presses, professional associations or learned societies
• Usually written by people who have academic credentials and/or are experts in their field
• Always cite information sources used to write an article and have full referencing included with each article. 

This means that the articles in academic journals have information that is reliable.

Another level of journal quality if the peer-reviewed journal. 

Peer reviewed Journals

Peer reviewed journals (also called refereed journals) are considered higher quality and these are the ones you should use in your assignments. 

Peer reviewed journals are written by experts and are reviewed by several other experts in the field before the article is published in a journal. This extensive editorial process takes place before publication and ensures that the articles are of a very high quality. 

Not all scholarly articles are peer-reviewed. As such it is important to understand how to check if a journal is peer reviewed or not. 

Most databases allow you to restrict your search to peer-reviewed articles, however in some cases this is not available. To confirm if a particular journal article is peer-reviewed, look up the journal on Ulrichsweb and locate the refereed icon.

Watch the how-to video on using Ulrich's web