What is peer review?
Not everything written about coffee carries the same weight. This page explains the difference — five minutes, no jargon.
When a scientist finishes a study, they send it to a journal. Before publishing, the journal sends it to two or three independent specialists — people who work on the same subject and had no part in the study. Those specialists are the “peers”. They look for holes: is the sample big enough? Does the method measure what it claims? Do the conclusions run further than the data? Often they demand corrections; sometimes they reject it outright. Only then is it published. That process is peer review.
Peer review does not make a study true. It makes it checked — someone qualified tried to knock it down and could not. A peer-reviewed study of 40 trees on one site is still a study of 40 trees on one site. Reading well means holding both of those thoughts.
The three labels you'll see here
Peer-reviewed
Published in a scientific journal after independent specialists assessed it. The highest standard of evidence there is — and even then bounded by place, scale and time.
Institutional
A report or manual from a research centre or sector institution — FAO, World Coffee Research, CATIE, EMBRAPA. Usually rigorous, written by serious people, but it never went to outside reviewers. A lot of the best practical guidance lives here.
Practitioner
Written or filmed by the people doing the work: growers, trainers, roasters. Concrete, and often the most useful thing on the shelf — but it is one person's experience, not proof.
What is Google Scholar?
It is a search engine for academic literature only: journal articles, theses, conference proceedings. Instead of web pages it returns studies, each with the number of times other scientists have cited it — a crude but useful signal of how much the work mattered in its field.
Google Scholar has no way for software to query it, so this section is built on OpenAlex — a free, open index covering the same literature with cleaner data (journal, year, DOI, open-access status) — plus CATIE's public library on coffee agroforestry, a collection assembled by hand by researchers in the field. You can always look the same study up in Scholar; we give you the DOI for exactly that.
DOI. A study's permanent code, something like 10.1007/s10457-020-00485-7. Pasted after doi.org in a browser it always reaches the paper — even if the journal moves house. It is the safest way to cite and to find something again.
How to read a paper in ten minutes
- Read the abstract. It says what they did and what they found. If that does not interest you, stop there — that is not laziness, it is good use of your time.
- Check where, and how much. A trial in Colombia under irrigation says little about rain-fed Gurué. Place and scale are half of the reading.
- Jump to the conclusions and the limitations. Good scientists write down themselves what the study does not prove. It is the most honest section in the paper.
- Only then look at the numbers. And if one of them would change your decision, find a second study saying the same thing before you change the field.
Missing a study?
If you know a paper that belongs here, send the DOI or the link. We check it against the official registry before it lands — so nothing arrives dressed as science without being it.
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