In WilsonWeb, a journal is identified as peer-reviewed by H.W. Wilson professional librarians and/or product specialists who look for either one of the following:

• A description of the journal's peer review process in its instructions to authors or manuscript submission guidelines.

Or

• Notice of an independent editorial review board in the journal's front matter. The academic or scholarly affiliation of each member of the board must be identified.
  (Those without affiliations are presumed not to be independent.)

What makes Wilson's assignment of a peer review label uniquely reliable is that we provide it only after first-hand examination of the journal. We do not rely on secondary sources such as Ulrich's International Periodical Directory or our own perceptions of a journal's scholarship.

The peer review label in WilsonWeb means literally that an independent scholar has recommended the article for publication. Users should be aware that many journals with serious and even scholarly content do not use the peer review process.

Important Question: Are all articles contained in a Peer Reviewed journal peer reviewed, as well?

Wilson has clearly stated in our definition of peer reviewed, that it refers to journals, not individual articles. This is the industry standard. The reason that those who follow this industry standard are all unanimous in identifying peer-reviewed journals rather than articles is because the journals themselves rarely indicate whether individual items are peer-reviewed. As a rule of thumb, a reasonable person can assume that editorials, short items, and book reviews are not peer reviewed. It’s also quite common in science journals to have a section of shorter communications that don’t undergo peer review in order to present results to the public more quickly. Sometimes a peer-reviewed journal will publish a long paper presented at a conference, and conference papers are almost never peer reviewed, but the journal won’t label it as non-peer-reviewed. The fact is, you can never be 100% certain that an individual item in a peer-reviewed journal has been reviewed, by how many reviewers, or whether it was revised or not in the course of the reviews.

Unlike the HW Wilson Company, there are some major vendors in our industry who have put aside this key distinction…returning every record in a peer reviewed journal, regardless of length or individual peer review status. In fact. Wilson actually goes a step beyond those other services in allowing users to quickly scan an undifferentiated list of results and pick out the peer review items. We have identified any article taken from a peer reviewed journal, identifying it with a small mortarboard hat icon, as illustrated below:

Brief citation display of a record from a peer reviewed journal,
illustrating the peer reviewed mortarboard icon.

Full citation display of a record from a peer reviewed journal,
with the mortarboard icon in the body of the citation.

Unlike the WilsonWeb means of displaying records that come from peer reviewed journals, most other vendors only permit two choices – 1. View a list limited to peer review results only, or 2. View a list that is not limited, giving no indication of peer review status.