Skip to Main Content

Scholarly vs. Non-Scholarly Periodicals: Scholarly

Your prof wants scholarly stuff right? Here's how to recognize it, find it, and use it when you see it.

What to look for

  • Scholarly journals generally have a sober, serious look.  They often contain many graphs and charts but few glossy pages or exciting pictures
  • Scholarly journals always cite their sources in the form of footnotes or bibliographies
  • Articles are written by a professional or by someone who has done research in a particular field of study
  • The language of scholarly journals is that of the discipline covered.  It assumes some scholarly background on the part of the reader
  • The main purpose of a scholarly journal is to report on original research or experimenta­tion in order to make such information available to the rest of the scholarly world
  • Many scholarly journals, but not all, are published by a specific professional organization
  • Scholarly sources are not typically free and accessible from Google searches

Examples

Psychological Bulletin

Journal of Marriage and the Family

JAMA:  The Journal of the American Medical Association

English Historical Review

Anatomy of a Scholarly Article

Click on the image to learn more about each part of the article.

I want to get one!

After you know what an academic or scholarly article is, what then?  Watch and see...

Covers

Scholarly journal won't be making appearances at your local grocery checkout aisle. Journals like these, with circulations of two to four thousand, clearly aren't focused on wide appeal. They provide platforms for scholars to share groundbreaking research results that are often arcane and difficult to read for outsiders, and yet are often the only source for groundbreaking research in all fields, including humanities, social sciences, and hard sciences.

 

                           

What does one look like?

Here is what a typical scholarly article from a journal might look like.

Peer Review in 3 Minutes

How to Read a Scholarly Article

Go to this page for cool infographic:  https://magic.piktochart.com/embed/3210658-esl-how-to-read-an-article-copy- 

From this libguide:  http://guides.library.illinois.edu/c.php?g=348324&p=2351069#s-lg-box-7167863