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Home > For Undergraduates > How to > Popular vs. Scholarly

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Popular Magazines vs. Scholarly Journals

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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 Ullrich’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 Academic OneFile. Keep in mind that many subject databases only contain scholarly information.
• For more information about finding articles, see our Find Articles help page.

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