EBSCO Peer Review Policy

I. Introduction

In order to consistently assign peer-review status to titles on our products, EBSCO has established the following guidelines for assigning peer-review.

II. Definition of peer-review

Peer-review is defined by EBSCO as:

1. Blind Peer-Review—articles appearing in a journal are sent outside of the journal's publishing or sponsoring organization for review by external reviewer(s) who are unaware of the author's identity. A double-blind peer-review process is one by which the author of the article is unknown to the reviewers and the reviewers of the article are unknown to the author.
2. Editorial Board Peer-Review—articles appearing in a journal are reviewed by an internal board of editors and not solely by one editor. The author's identity may be known or unknown.
3. Expert Peer-Review—articles appearing in a journal are reviewed by experts (either internal or external to the journal) whose credentials are known and are experts within the subject matter of the article under review. The author's identity may be known or unknown.

III. Criteria for establishing peer-reviewed status

EBSCO uses the following sources to identify peer-reviewed journals:

1. The journal’s website and/or The Serials Directory, an online directory of serials with descriptions
2. The publisher of the journal
3. Feedback from librarians and professors
4. EBSCO staff librarians

IV. Review of the peer-review assignment process

EBSCO periodically conducts reviews of its peer-review assessments for quality control purposes.