Scholarly journals are written by experts in a specific field or discipline.
Scholarly journals are oftentimes peer reviewed or refereed. A peer-reviewed article goes through a process where other scholars in the same field critically evaluate the article. The definite evaluation is similar to editing notes, where the author receives detailed and constructive feedback from the peer experts. However, the review process is not made available publicly.
Please note that not all scholarly journals go through the peer-review process. In short, “scholarly” means the article was written by an expert in a particular field. “Peer-reviewed” takes it one step further and means the article was reviewed and criticized by the author’s peers who are experts in the same field. Most of scholarly articles are peer reviewed.
However, because there are many different types of peer-review, be sure to evaluate the resource itself to determine if it is suitable for your research needs.
Most of our databases have limiter to identify scholarly journals and peer reviewed articles, see example below from Proquest Central:
