Students are often tasked with finding peer reviewed or refereed articles to use as sources in research based assignments.  Do you know what this means?  Professors often forget that students may not have ever encountered these terms or they may have heard them but no one has ever explained them.  

Collins English Dictionary defines peer review as

"the evaluation by fellow specialists of research that someone has done in order to assess its suitability for publication or further development."  (peer review. (2014). In Collins Dictionaries (Ed.), Collins English Dictionary (12th ed.). London, UK: Collins. Retrieved from http://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/hcengdict/peer_review/0?institutionId=5281)

The following resources will explain the difference between popular magazines and academic (usually peer reviewed or refereed) journals, introduce you to effective strategies to help you decipher scholarly articles, and offer some techniques to help you learn to paraphrase properly.