Intro to Academic Research
Popular and Scholarly Journals
While gathering resources for your research assignment you will, most likely, need not only books but articles from journals and/or magazines. Your professors may require that you use "scholarly" or "peer reviewed" journals for articles as opposed to popular journals. Although there is some valuable information that can be gained from popular sources, the purpose of those sources are different that scholarly sources. Knowing the difference between popular and scholarly journals is very useful. Let's take a look at the difference between popular and scholarly journals.
Popular Journals
Popular journals include news, feature stories, opinion/editorial pieces, etc. The goal of popular journals is to inform and entertain.
You can determine whether a publication is a popular journal by the following criteria:
- Provides brief information
- Covers news or current events
- Rarely has a bibliography or references
- Articles are usually short
- Often unsigned; even if signed, there is usually no information about the expertise of the author
- Has lots of advertisements, glossy photographs, and “eye-catching” colorful illustrations
- Written for a general audience
At first glance some "professional" magazines may appear to be scholarly journals. Make sure you check the criteria for scholarly journals to determine if it is a scholarly journal or a popular journal. Don't judge just by title.
Examples of Popular Journals
Scholarly Journals
Scholarly journals are usually peer-reviewed. This means that each article was sent by the editors to other experts in the subject for their comments and approval. You can find if a journal is peer-reviewed in a statement about the journal, usually inside the front or back cover.
You can usually tell if a journal is scholarly by the following criteria:
- Provides in-depth analysis of subjects
- Reports on original scholarly research
- Has a bibliography of works cited
- Contains lengthy articles, typically more than 5 pages
- Signed by the author; a sentence about the author's academic background is often included
- Follows standard citation format
- Any illustrations or photographs support the argument of the text
- Written in the jargon of the discipline
You can find scholarly journals and articles in many of the library's databases. Databases likes Academic Search Complete, Education Source, PyscINFO, and others allow you to limit results to peer-reviewed or scholarly journals and articles. Some databases, like JSTOR, only contain scholarly content.
Examples of Scholarly Journals
