Tips for Biology 101 Signature Assignment: Home

What's a peer-reviewed article?

Peer-reviewed articles are very specific sorts of publications, usually found in databases that provide access to journals that publish these articles.

Common features of a peer-reviewed article include:

1. Multiple authors
2. Author affilitations and contact information
3. Discrete sections like an abstract, methods, discussion
4. Lots of data
5. Citations in the text and at the end of an article

To find peer-reviewed articles for this assignment, try searching these databases:

Understanding peer-reviewed articles

Peer-reviewed articles can be tricky to read. The good news is that you can get a lot of information from the  article without having to read it beginning to end. When reading a peer-reviewed article, try the following:

1. Read the Abstract
   • This is an executive summary of the article. It briefly tells you what the experiment was about and what the researchers learned.
2. Read the Introduction
   • This goes a little more in-depth and explains why the scientists were conducting this experiment, their hypotheses, and what they expected to find out.
3. Skip to the end of the article and read the discussion/conclusion
   • It may seem strange to skip all the stuff in the middle of the paper, but much of it is a methods section in which the researchers discuss in detail how they did the experiment. This is less important than what they found out, which is usually in the last section or two of the article.

Need help? Ask a librarian!

Looking for a definition of a term or basic information about catalysis or enzymes? Check out some of the resources below. They are excellent locations to start your research