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General Engineering Research Guide

What are Journals?

A journal is a periodical publication that contains scholarly information in a subject area.  Scholarly or academic journals are collections of journal articles written by professors, researchers, or experts in a given field. 

Journals are one type of serial, which is any publication published in parts (usually in regular intervals).  Other types of serials are magazines and trade publications.  Articles that undergo a review process by other experts before publication are known as peer-reviewed.

An image of popular and scholarly journals.

Engineering eJournals @ the Dalhousie Libraries

The Peer Review Process

Peer-reviewed journal articles go through a checking or verification process before they are published. Other experts in the same field of study as that of the article, examine the article's content to make sure it is valid and correct before the article is published. Articles can be accepted as is, sent back for revisions, or rejected outright. Published articles that have gone through this validation process are known as peer-reviewed articles.

This is a visual image of the peer-review process:

An image of the peer review process.

https://ucsd.libguides.com/CAT3/peerreview

Finding Peer-Reviewed Journals

Get it @ Dal!

Image of Get it at Dal logo.

The 'Get it @ Dal button', which you will see in most journal article databases is very important, since it helps you to locate journal articles -- to access the electronic full-text directly, to find the journal location in Novanet, or to order the journal article through Document Delivery.

Directory of Open Access Journals

An image of the DOAJ logo.

DOAJ is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals. ​