How to Read Science Research, Chapter 2: Where to Find Peer-Reviewed Research

In my last post, we learned a little bit about why peer review is important. Next, we’ll talk about where to find this peer-reviewed research.

This is actually a little more complicated than you’d think. Although the internet has made all sorts of information widely available, not all of that information is equally valid. Anyone can write a blog, right?

If you want to read about peer-reviewed research directly from the scientists themselves, you’ll need to find the journals that published the research. Google Scholar is a great place to start, because it can search through many, many reviewed journals by keyword, date, and other search fields. There are also field-specific search engines, in case you wanted to limit your search to, say, only the field of science, or only the field of linguistics. You can find a limited list of field-specific search engines here.

However, peer review is a long and expensive process, and journals often charge for an annual subscription or even per article. Many universities offer free online access to many journals to students and employees. Some even have access for alumni! Some employers will offer journal access.

If you don’t have access through school or work, your supply of peer-reviewed journal articles will be limited. There is a movement to make research more widely available, but that’s still in the works and somewhat controversial.

There are some reliable free sources, though. You can find 7 million free articles made available by the NIH or use some of these search engines to find only free articles.

You can also usually read the abstract (author-written summary) of many peer-reviewed journal articles for free, so you can actually get quite a bit of information without having to pay. I’ll talk about how to read abstracts in a later post.

Lastly, the easiest way to read about peer-reviewed research is to find other sites that have digested that research and spit out a summary. You can recognize a site that summarizes peer-reviewed research because it will usually list “References” or “Sources” that include peer-reviewed journals and organizations. Examples of sites like this are Mayo Clinic and the CDC. However, once you leave the original source, you leave room for an author’s interpretation, and once you end up with a summary of a summary of a summary of peer-reviewed research, you could be reading anything. Try to stick to reliable and well-reputed pages that cite peer-reviewed research directly for the most accurate interpretations.

Stay tuned for Chapter 3: What’s the Difference Between a Theory, Fact, Law, and Hypothesis?