Social Work: Evidence-Based Practice 

What is a peer-reviewed journal?

• A peer-reviewed journal has scholarly articles that have been through a rigorous review process by 3-5 scholars in  the field before being published. 


• Because these articles have been through this review process, articles in peer-reviewed journals are good sources of evidence-based information.


• Peer-reviewed journal are also known as refereed journals.

More and more of our journal subscriptions are available online. However, when you are searching a database, you may encounter an article citation that is available in a journal that we only have in print at the Chestnut Hill Campus. If that is the case, we can still get the article to you. Send us an e-mail at swlib@bc.edu, and give us the full citation of the article that you need. We will scan a copy of the article and e-mail it to you within 24 hours.

There are several ways of finding and identifying peer-reviewed articles:

• PsycInfo, Pilots, Social Services Abstracts, and ASSIA all have a special tab that identifies peer-reviewed articles. You will see this tab after you have typed in your keywords and clicked on the search button.


• The abstracts/citations of the journal records from PsycInfo, Pilots, Social Services Abstracts, and ASSIA will indicate that the article is from a peer-reviewed journal.


• If you cannot find information about the peer-reviewed status of a journal, you can look up the title of the journal in Ulrich's International Periodicals Directory. Ulrich's has basic information about all journals that are currently being published, and indicates whether each journal title is refereed (or peer-reviewed).