Scholarly/Popular/Trade Magazines & Journals

Periodicals – journals, magazines, and newspapers – are published works that appear on a regular

schedule. They are useful resources when doing research, but each serves a different purpose. When

doing college-level research, often you’ll be using journals to find information. A phrase you’ll often

hear your professors use is “peer-reviewed” (or “scholarly”) journal articles. What is a peer-reviewed

article and why should you use it? How do you differentiate between a magazine article and a journal

article?

When a manuscript is submitted to a peer-reviewed publication, a panel of experts reviews the article to

ensure that it meets rigorous standards of quality and accuracy, and the research methodology used is

sound. Unlike magazine articles, scholarly journal articles require their authors to document their

sources, verifying the facts, ideas, and methods they used to arrive at their insights and conclusions.

Journal articles report on new research, or provide a critique or review of existing research. Whereas

magazine articles often tell a story or provide an opinion, journal articles take a more unbiased view and

report on or analyze previous research, or provide support or criticism for the existing literature in a

field, substantiating the information through provided sources.

The following chart demonstrates the differences between three types of articles:

Scholarly Journal Article Trade Journal Article Popular Magazine Article

Purpose Share results of research and experiments.

Share information with individuals with an interest in a particular field.

To entertain or inform; generally covers many subjects.

Author Usually a scholar or researcher in the field.

Often a staff writer with expertise in the field.

A journalist or feature writer, name not always given.

Intended Audience

Other scholars, academics, or researchers.

Practitioners in a particular field.

General public.

Style Uses technical or discipline-specific language.

Often a combination of research articles & practical suggestions.

Casual language used (often high school reading level or lower).

Appearance Generally text-based with tables or charts to illustrate research, but few, if any, pictures or advertisements.

Often includes graphics, pictures, and ads geared at the industry.

Often accompanied by photographs and graphics, along with general advertisements.

Sources Always cites sources, referred to as “References”, “Works Cited” or “Bibliographies”, or given as footnotes.

Sometimes cites sources. Rarely cites sources; article may refer to “a study”, but not give a reference for that study so that one could verify it.

Structure Articles normally have sections such as Abstract, Methodology, and Conclusion

Example

The American Journal of Sports Medicine

Coach & Athletic Director

Time Magazine

It is usually easy to differentiate if you have a journal and magazine in hand, but how do you tell when

you’re looking at online articles? If you’re using one of the library’s periodical databases (such as

InfoTrac, EBSCOHost, or ABI/Inform--Global), they will actually give you the option to limit results to only

those which are “scholarly” or “peer-reviewed”. If you have trouble finding this option, contact the

library.

If you’re on the web doing research, sometimes you can still tell whether an article is scholarly or not by

looking at the format. Does it list references and give its sources? Does it say what journal it was

published in? (Make sure that it isn’t a non-published paper or thesis that someone posted online).

One thing you can do to see if a journal is peer-reviewed or not is to go to its website and look at the

“About Us” information, or information for authors who want to submit a paper. Often you will be able

to tell from that if they are a peer-reviewed journal or not.

Of course if you’re having trouble deciding if something is considered scholarly or not, contact us!

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Following are 2 sample pages from The American Journal of Sports Medicine. Notice that the authors &

their affiliations are listed, as well as including sections such as “Study Design”, “Methods”, and

“Results”. Also note that it cites its sources, and lists these references at the end. Compare this to the

trade journal article (Helmet Research….) which was written by the editor of the magazine, and does not

list any sources. Both of them contain useful information, but if you are looking for substantiated,

scholarly information, you would want to focus on the article from The American Journal of Sports

Medicine.