Peer-reviewed articles are published in journals that first send articles to be scrutinized by external reviewers, who are experts within the journal's discipline, before they agree to publish them. These reviewers verify that an article used appropriate research methods and sound analysis of results and generally can be trusted. Peer-reviewed journals differ from popular magazines, whose editors select articles based on popular appeal.

All authors who publish in the scholarly literature must cite sources they used in the writing of the article, so you will find a section at the end of the article named bibliography, sources cited, works cited, references, or endnotes.

From a practical standpoint, many databases offer a limiter (checkbox) that enables you to restrict your search to only those articles from Peer-reviewed journals. Therefore, selecting this limiter at any point in your search will exclusively produce articles from peer-reviewed journals.