MAE 272 (Antelope Valley): Scholarly/Trade/Popular journals

How do you recognize scholarly - also referred to as peer-reviewed - articles in engineering and science?

• TITLE : clear, precise and often lengthy
• AUTHORS (usually more than one): experts with their affiliations listed
• ABSTRACT: often long and detailed
• INTRODUCTION of the topic, statement of the problem, background information and purpose of the study
• LITERATURE REVIEW: review of previous studies on the topic and related studies
• METHODS and TECHNIQUES used so that other researchers can repeat the study 
• RESULTS section includes new observations, data and findings  
• DISCUSSION/CONCLUSION section on what the findings mean and their implications and indications for future research
• REFERENCES (also called citations): a list of all the works used or referred to in the paper.  Lack of references may be a clue that it may not be a scholarly paper
• LENGTH of the article is another criterion (scholarly articles tend to be long)
• FUNDING: indication if an external body funded research
• Peer-reviewed journals can also be identified by their editorial statements or instructions to authors (usually in first few pages of the journal or at the end) or on the home page of the journal.

A large proportion of the scholarly journals in engineering are published by the professional associations (ASME, IEEE, ASCE, ACM, AIChem E etc.) and major commercial publishers (Elsevier, Wiley, Springer etc.). Not all the sections in a scholarly journal are peer-reviewed: editorial articles and news items are two sections that are not peer-reviewed

Scholarly articles go through a Peer-Review Process:

• Author(S) submit journal article to a scholarly/research journal
• Editor sends the article out for review to experts (usually at least 2) in the field (peers)
• Reviewers recommend whether the article should be published or not in the journal
• Reviewers make recommendations: asking for clarifications if some point is not clear,
• Authors make the changes and resubmit to the editor
• Article is accepted for publication  

It takes time – often journals indicate when the article was received and the final publication date. Keep a look out for this information – it is interesting and will give you an insight into the process!