Understanding the difference between scholarly journals and popular magazines is important for academic work. This page provides you with links and exercises to aid in determining the difference. For information on evaluating web pages, please see the Evaluation page from the Hagan Memorial Library web page.
If you have questions, please do no hesitate to contact a librarian.
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Scholarly Journal
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Popular Magazine
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Often will have the word "journal" in the title.
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May have the word "journal," such as Ladies Home Journal, but this is rare.
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Lengthy articles that cite sources in the form of footnotes, bibliography, reference list, an/or works cited section. Articles are often peer reviewed by other scholars in the field.
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Articles are rarely footnoted, with little or no documentation. Review process may be done by magazine editor.
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Written by an expert in the field, with author's credentials provided (affiliation, name of school, etc).
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Written by a staff member of the publication or freelance author. Articles may not be signed by the author.
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Covers usually plain. Articles are not illustrated, unless with graphs, diagrams or charts.
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Glossy pictures, covers and often heavily illustrated.
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Concerned with academic study and/or research.
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Goal is to entertain the reader and general public.
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Usually contains technical jargon and terminology of the field. Assumes reader has similar scholarly background.
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Very simple language, written for general readers.
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Examples
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Examples
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Journal of Experimental Psychology
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Psychology Today
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History : The Journal of the Historical Association
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Time
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What if you use an online database to find articles?If you use EBSCO Host, JSTOR or another database available from the Hagan Memorial Library, it may be a bit more difficult to determine if the article is from a scholarly journal. Usually it is easily to tell a scholarly journal from a popular magazine if you have the journal in your hand. They look quite different, as you can see from the clues listed in the chart above. If you are using an article online, check the chart below or talk with a librarian.
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The more subject-specific the index, the higher the probability that the articles indexed are scholarly
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PsycINFO indexes more scholarly articles in psychology than
MAS FULL TEXT ULTRA
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Journal titles with the words "Journal of the" or "Journal for the" in the title are usually scholarly
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You usually will find footnotes and/or a bibliography in online scholarly articles
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Typically, the longer the article, the more scholarly
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Additional information can be found at the following Internet sites:
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