What is Peer Review?
Your instructor may want you to use "peer reviewed" articles as sources for your paper. Or you may be asked to find 
"academic," "scholarly," or "refereed" articles. What do these terms mean?
Let's start with the terms academic and scholarly, which are synonyms. An academic or scholarly journal is one intended for a specialized or expert audience. Journals like this exist in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Examples include Nature, Journal of Sociology, and Journal of American Studies. Scholarly/academic journals exist to help scholars communicate their latest research and ideas to each other; they are written "by experts for experts."
Most scholarly/academic journals are peer reviewed; another synonym for peer reviewed is refereed. Before an article is published in a peer-reviewed journal, it's evaluated for quality and significance by several specialists in the same field, who are "peers" of the author. The article may go through several revisions before it finally reaches publication.
Magazines like Time or Scientific American, newspapers, (most) books, government documents, and websites are not peer-reviewed, though they may be thoroughly edited and fact-checked. Articles in scholarly journals (in printed format or online) usually ARE peer-reviewed.
How can you tell if an article is both scholarly and peer-reviewed?
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Be critical
The research process is part of the composition process. Don't be afraid to let your personal taste and inclinations guide the direction of your research. What are you interested in or passionate about? How can you find out more about those things? Many successful scholars research topics and documents which nobody had ever thought to explore, and tie them together with the strings of their own personal obsessions and thematic fixations.
It's also important, however, to Critically Analyze Information Sources (Cornell). Doing scholarly research (this is a paper for school, after all) requires different skills than those you've developed from years of online searching. Google and other search engines reward certain approaches that create false expectations and poor research results when you try to transfer those skills to library databases. Here are a few tips:
- Consider what kinds of sources you need. If you know you need peer-reviewed journal articles, where can you find those? In the same way that you wouldn't want to search in the MLA International Bibliography for local movie times, you probably don't want to search in Google for scholarly articles on literature.
- Slow down. There are often really great search features available at your fingertips, and you just have to resist the temptation to hit the Search button for 20 seconds to scan the search interface:
- Is there an advanced search page?
- Can you limit to peer-reviewed articles?
- Can you limit by the year published?
- Can you use any subject terms to get more relevant results?
- Iterative searching
- Learn from the search results
- Too many results? Too few?
- Look at citations from good sources
And When You Find It...Evaluate It!
You already know that you should evaluate anything you find on the Internet. Here are some reminders of what to look for.