History

Think of the peer review process as a scholarly conversation. Other ways historians converse about methods, theories and sources include:

• Historiographical essays
• Book reviews
• In footnotes
• Conference presentations
• Blogs and other informal work

Scholarly journals are journals that publish peer reviewed articles. A peer reviewed article is one that has been scrutinized by other scholars or experts (peer reviewers) in a field prior to publication. Peer reviewers look to see that an article

• conforms to accepted standards of a profession
• makes no unwarranted or irrelevant claims based on the evidence
• is free from unacceptable interpretations and personal views

Popular, non-peer-reviewed articles are ones that do not undergo academic scrutiny; these kinds of articles are generally found in news magazines like Time and National Geographic.

View this short video from NCSU libraries that explains the peer review process.

There are two types of footnotes (or endnotes) in historical writing. Anthony Brundage in Going to the Sources calls them reference footnotes and content footnotes.¹

• Reference footnotes cite the bibliographic source of a quotation, fact or idea. The first footnote on this page is an example of a reference footnote.
• Content footnotes can be extended commentary, an exploration of a tangent of thought related to the subject in the main body of text, or a discussion of the historiography surrounding a topic. Here is one example of a content footnote displaying a 'conversation' about a source.

From: Lewis, Michael. Rioters and Citizens: Mass Protest in Imperial Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.