Periodicals: Scholarly Journals

Articles published in scholarly journals are written for a scholarly audience. Often you may be required to use scholarly articles exclusively. It is therefore important that you be able to distinguish between scholarly articles and other types of articles.

General characteristics are

• Authors are authorities in their fields.
• Authors cite their sources in endnotes, footnotes, or bibliographies.
• Intended audience includes scholars in the discipline or those doing research in the discipline.
• Articles must go through a peer-review process.
• Individual issues have little or no advertising, as journals are funded through subscriptions not advertising.
• Articles are usually reports on scholarly research.
• Illustrations usually take the form of charts and graphs.
• Articles use jargon of the discipline.

Peer Review

Some journals use a peer review editorial process. Submissions to the journal are reviewed by a panel of experts in the field. This panel of peers determines which articles are worthy of inclusion. Peer reviewed journals tend to be the most prestigious of the scholarly journals.

How to find articles from scholarly journals?

• Search an index or electronic database for articles on a topic.
• Indexes or electronic databases can be multi-disciplinary or specific to a discipline.