Library & Research Overview: How to Identify a Peer-Reviewed Research Article

Select Peer-Reviewed or Scholarly when you search

Omnivore ArticleSearch, and most databases, have a button to check when you search or limit/filter your search results.
Omnivore Articles screenshots 

Articles are labelled in Omnivore as "Peer-reviewed"

Confirm that an article in a peer-reviewed journal is a Research article

Limiting your search results to articles published in peer reviewed scholarly journals is the first step. 
Scholarly Journals include other types of documents, such as essays, literature reviews, book reviews, commentary, letters to the editor, announcements, etc. So...

How do I know if it is an actual research article? 

A research article reports the original work of a scholar and will present evidence and conclusions.

Read the Abstract (summary of the article) or Introduction (first paragraph) to identify the type of article and the topics covered.

A research article must have:

• a named Author
• a Bibliography or References
• PDF format available
• more than a few pages

How to Identify a Scientific Research Study

Look at the structure of the article; most articles that report results of a research study use a standard format:

• Abstract (summary of the whole article)
• Introduction (why they did the research)
• Materials & Methodology (how they did the research)
• Results (what happened)
• Discussion (what the results mean)
• Conclusion (what they learned)
• References (whose research they read)