Popular vs. Scholarly

Challenge:

Find a magazine article and a scholarly journal article on the same subject.

Solution:

There are two approaches.

You can use a general index that has both scholarly and popular articles. The following include both popular and scholarly titles:

Choosing options like peer-reviewed, refereed, and scholarly will limit you to scholarly journal results only.

Another option is to use a scholarly subject index to find the journal article and Readers Guide Abstracts to find the magazine article.

Scholarly indexes do not have popular magazines articles. [Reader's Guide, on the other hand, does not have scholarly articles.] Examples of scholarly indexes include:

All of the indexes listed above can be found in SearchTools.

Sometimes it is hard to tell whether you have a scholarly or a popular article when you are looking at an online full-text article. Here are some clues:

	Journal [scholarly]	Magazine [popular]
Content	Detailed report of original research or experiment.	Secondary report or discussion may include personal narrative, opinion, anecdotes.
Author	Author's credentials are given, usually a scholar with subject expertise.	Author may or may not be named; often a professional writer; may or may not have subject expertise.
Audience	Scholars, researchers, students.	General public; the interested non-Specialist.
Language	Specialized terminology or jargon of the field; requires prior knowledge.	Vocabulary in general usage; understandable to most readers.
References/ Bibliography	Required. All quotes and facts can be verified.	Rare. Scanty, if any, information about sources.
Examples	Developmental Psychology Journal of Abnormal Psychology. Almost anything with Journal in the title. Usually come with memberships in scholarly societies and are only available in libraries.	Psychology Today, Discover, news magazines. Almost anything available in a store.

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