Recreation Services Management

Here are some general characteristics that usually apply to peer reviewed journals and their articles:

• Article will be organized into at least 2 of the following sections:
  • Introduction & literature review
  • Theory or background
  • Methods (how I did my research)
  • Results
  • Conclusion and/or discussion
• Tone or language of the article will reflect the subject discipline for which it is written. It assumes some scholarly background on the part of the reader
• Most scholarly articles report on original research or experimentation
• May be accompanied by supporting charts and diagrams, but there may be few pictures
• Journal will have little or no advertisement

Is it peer reviewed? How do you know? We have a few ways to sort your results, or identify if your specific result is peer reviewed.

1. Sort your results: Most of our databases have a feature that allows you to limit or refine your search results to only those that are peer-reviewed. Look for that option on the search screen.  Pro tip: some database providers have a more lenient definition of peer reviewed, if you're not sure check with a librarian or your professor.

2. I'm not sure if this article or journal is peer reviewed:

You can look up the journal by title or ISSN number in Ulrich’s Periodicals Directory. Once you locate the journal, Ulrich's will tell you, by having an image of a referee shirt or not,  if a journal is peer reviewed or not.  Below, you can see that of the six results, the first and fifth result are not peer reviewed and the second, third, fourth, and sixth are peer reviewed.

• If you want to see if a particular journal is peer reviewed, go to Ulrich's Periodical Directory (you can get there from the Database A to Z list as well).  
• Do a search by Journal Title (here we used "Journal of Anthropology") to see if a journal is peer reviewed.  There will be an image of a referee jersey next to the title if it is peer reviewed. 
• In the below example, the search for "Journal of Anthropology" UNLV is not a peer reviewed journal, but The Australian Journal of Anthropology is (both electronic and print).

Popular magazines are those that are published with the general reader in mind. The articles generally assume no prior knowledge on the part of the reader and are written by journalists or editors. The goal may be to inform, entertain or persuade the reader.

Popular Magazines may have lots of pictures and they will have advertisements.

Some examples:

• Consumer Reports
• Mademoiselle
• Newsweek
• Runners World
• Sports Illustrated

Trade publications are often written by and for professionals within a field or industry. The publication may cover emerging trends, current news and new products. The articles may be "how to" in nature or give practical advise for practitioners in a field. They are usually not academic in nature and are not peer reviewed. The publication will often contain advertisements and photos.   They can look academic, so be sure to review sources carefully.