Your professors may stipulate that you must cite scholarly journal articles when writing a paper or doing a project. In order to find scholarly journal articles on your research topic, you will need to know how to distinguish them from articles in popular magazines and newspapers.

Looking at periodicals in print format, you can usually distinguish the scholarly journals from the popular magazines and newspapers. However, looking at articles in an online database does not offer you the visual clues described below. You may need to ask your professor or a reference librarian for help in correctly identifying online articles as either scholarly or popular.

Two of our largest databases, Academic Search Premier and Expanded Academic ASAP, offer you the option of limiting your search results to scholary/peer reviewed articles.