How can I quickly sort what is peer-reviewed and what isn't in a wide body of literature? I have long list of literature to review that I have inserted in Excel (title, authors, year, journal, etc.). I would like to quickly sort out which journals are peer-reviewed and which aren't.

I know I can check through each individual journal's site to see if they involve peer review, but is there a more efficient tool to do this? A search engine of some kind that would quickly show if a specific journal is reviewed or not?
I haven't actually carried this out, but here's a series of steps that might help:


The basic idea is that some academic databases have an option to filter search results by peer-reviewed status. You would use such sites.


At least two that I know of are EBSCO's Business Source Ultimate (BSU) and ProQuest.

You start by searching your chosen database with a generic keyword that would feature in every relevant journal (not necessarily every article, but surely every relevant journal) in your database.


For example, my field is information systems. So, I search for "information" on Business Source Ultimate (BSU): I get around 2.7 million results.

Now you filter by peer reviewed jouranls. 


In BSU, I clicked the Limit To option: "Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals": I get around 580,000 results. I further click "Academic journals" and get 540,000 results.

You might have to fine-tune the results to get a smaller number.


In the case of BSU, I can export a maximum of 25,000 results, so 540,000 is way too much. So, I fine-tuned my search until I found that searching for "information system" gave only 19,000 results.

Follow the instructions for your database to export ALL the results (not just the 20 or so that appear in your screen) to a spreadsheet file (e.g. Microsoft Excel).


EBSCO has instructions for exporting up to 25,000 results. Unfortunately, for some reason, this mass export option is disabled in my school library system, so my step-by-step example has to end here.

Use the spreadsheet software to remove all the duplicates in the journal column. (Here are instructions for doing that in Excel.)
So, there's your list of peer-reviewed journals in your field of interest.
You can compare your original list of journals with your list of peer-reviewed journals.
If there is any journal from your original list not on the exported list, then do not automatically assume it is not peer-reviewed (my steps are not foolproof); rather you can verify their peer-review status individually just to make sure. But that would be a lot shorter list than what you started with.


Actually, you could repeat all the steps above except to include ALL articles without filtering out non-peer-reviewed journals. Then the difference between the two exported journal lists would be a list of non-peer-reviewed journals, if that makes sense.



But all that said, you cannot assume that the database's marking of peer-reviewed journals is absolutely accurate. However, I hope this idea might help.