Academic Journal vs. Peer reviewed journal??

[mandyjk77]

What's the difference, are they the same thing?

Thanks!

[woodsyny, MSN]

An Academic Journal is a peer reviewed periodical

[llg, PhD, RN]

They are not necessarily the same thing. "Peer-reviewed" means that a panel of experts in the field reviews all of the articles submitted to the journal for publication. Usually, it is expected that the review be "blind" in that the reviewers do not who wrote the article they are reviewing, but in reality, that is not always the case. The only articles that are actually published in the journal are the ones that are approved by the review panel. Supposedly, that helps to assure the reader that the author has followed appropriate research procedures, complied with appropriate standards of reporting, writing, citation, etc. But the system is not perfect.

An "academic" journal might be peer-reviewed -- but then again, it might not be. A journal might publish very academic articles, but not use a peer-review process to select articles for publication. The journal's website should give you that sort of information. Also, many actual paper copies of journals will include that information on a page within each issue. That's a problem with online journal access: you find an article from XYZ journal, but you have no idea if that journal is peer-reviewed unless you do some additional digging. In the older days, each issue of every journal had a page (usually just after the Table of Contents) that gave you information about the publisher, whether or not it was peer-reviewed, where to address questions, how to submit an article for possible publication, etc. Now you have to dig for that information on other websites.

[rninme]

You can also select peer reviewed as part of your search criteria. Easiest way to find those kind of articles that I am aware of.