Question: What is peer review?

Scholarly articles go through a process called peer-review before they are published. The process works like this:

1. A scholar writes an article and submits it to a journal (Journal of Political Economy for example).
2. The editor of the journal submits it to a group of the scholars "peers." These peers are other experts/scholars on that same subject.
3. The peer-reviewers examine the article to ensure it's quality research worthy of being published in that journal. They may recommend it be published, recommend changes, or reject the article.

Peer-review is essentially a quality control step that occurs before the article is published under that journal's reputation.