Popular Magazines vs. Scholarly Journals
In order to choose the best articles for your research, you will need to understand the difference between popular magazines and scholarly journals and be able to identify them.
| Popular | Scholarly* | |
| Writer | Staff writers and journalists | Scholars/researchers |
| Audience | General public | Scholars, including college students |
| Reviewed by | Editor | Editorial board made up of other scholars and researchers |
| Article style/purpose | Shorter articles written to entertain, inform or elicit an emotional response | Longer articles written in a formal, scholarly style to share facts and research with the academic community |
| Documentation | None | Footnotes/endnotes; bibliographies |
| Frequency | Usually published frequently (weekly or monthly) | Usually published less frequently (quarterly, semi-annually) |
| Advertisements | Numerous ads for a variety of products | If there are any ads, they are usually for scholarly products such as books |
| Illustrations | Usually numerous | Fewer, and often include charts and graphs to support research findings |
| Appearance | Usually glossy and larger in size | Usually smaller in size, thicker and with a plain cover |
| Examples |
Time , Psychology Today , Rolling Stone , New Yorker (magazines you may subscribe to or buy at a newsstand) |
Journal of Southern History , Annual Review of Psychology , American Literature , New England Journal of Medicine |
* Scholarly sources may also be referred to as academic, peer-reviewed or refereed.
Example:
You are writing a paper about eating disorders among college-aged women. Both popular and scholarly sources may be useful for this paper.
Popular sources: Use women's magazines to find personal narratives by college-aged women with eating disorders.
Scholarly sources: Use scholarly journals to find an article by a psychologist reporting findings from a research study of the causes of eating disorders among college-aged women.
Tips:
- If you can't tell if something is scholarly or popular, search Ulrich's Periodicals Directory for the title of the journal or magazine and check the "Document Type" for the terms "academic/scholarly" or "consumer," which is another term for "popular."
- When searching for articles, many databases give you an option of limiting your search to refereed/scholarly/peer-reviewed sources. For multidiscplinary databases, try Academic Search Complete and Expanded Academic ASAP. Keep in mind that many subject databases only contain scholary information.
- For more information about finding articles, see our Finding Articles help page.
