What is a peer-reviewed source?
The term peer-reviewed (also known as scholarly or refereed) refers any text that has undergone a specific review process by experts and scholars within the field it is written. The most typical form of a peer-reviewed source is the journal article, where authors submit their articles to the editor for a scholarly journal (usually field-specific), and the editor in turn sends that article to the reviewers of the journal. Often, an author's information will be removed from the article, thus making it a "blind review" so as to eliminate bias and ensure that any feedback of the article is based entirely on its own merits. These reviewers are the aforementioned experts and scholars within the field the article is written, and judge the article based on its quality of writing, research, and content.
A Visual Interpretation of the Peer Review Process (click to enlarge)
