Library Instruction

Popular or Scholarly -- How can I tell?

The basic differences between popular and scholarly articles arise from the audience for which the periodical is written.

Criteria	Popular Magazines	Scholarly Journals

Audience	general public	scholars, students, professionals
Appearance	lots of color, advertising, illustrations, short articles	mostly text, black & white, graphs & charts, long articles with bibliographies & footnotes
Content	feature articles on timely topics; written for a general audience in a language that is easy to understand	researched and footnoted articles; written for a specialized audience in a vocabulary that is not easily understood by the average reader
Author(ity)	written by staff & freelance writers; checked by editors	authored by researchers, academics, specialists; peer-reviewed
Examples	Time; Business Week; People	The Journal of American History; Signs

Where can I find scholarly articles? Use an index or online database to locate several articles on a topic.

STARTING POINTS: EBSCOHost's Academic Search Premier is a general periodical databases, will provide some full-text scholarly articles as well as citations to others that are not full-text. An option for limiting the search to scholarly/peer-reviewed articles is available in each database.
FOLLOW UP with a specialized database that covers the topic area. Most specialized databases contain citations and occasionally full-text articles that are primarily from scholarly publications. For assistance with selecting an appropriate specialized database, consult a librarian at the Reference Desk.