Evaluating Information Sources

Peer Review.  The process of obtaining impartial opinions from the research and academic community in order to ascertain whether papers submitted for publication in journals are of a sustainable standard. 

Referee.  An independent expert who assists the editor of a journal in evaluating the acceptability of contributions submitted for publication.

Peer review is a term that generally applies to research articles in scholarly journals. 

1.   Scholar writes a paper and submits it to a journal.

2.   Journal editor sends the paper to other scholars for anonymous review of quality and originality:

• Was the work done properly?
• Does the research contribute something new?
• Is the subject matter
  appropriate for this journal?
• Is the paper written well enough for other scholars to understand it?

3.   Editor uses the reviewers' comments and recommendations to accept the paper or to reject it.  Most accepted papers require revisions to become a scholarly article.

Taken from http://www.lib.uci.edu/how/tutorials/FindScienceInformation/public/