Journals & Periodicals: Identifying Scholarly Sources

Signs you have a scholarly article:

• References/Bibliography/Works Cited -- Whatever it may be called, there's a long list of sources at the end of the article. The sources referenced themselves tend to be scholarly.
• Authors are experts -- Look for the authors to have at least Masters degrees (probably PhDs) from accredited universities.
• Language is a bit dense -- The article title is long and descriptive, and so are the sentences. A high-level vocabulary using jargon or technical terms as well as potentially complex sentence structure are noticeable. The audience of these articles is intended for other scholars in that field.
• Few or no images -- Not a lot of decoration in these articles. Images that exist are probably charts or graphs to help present data. You also shouldn't be seeing ads around the article.
• Lengthy -- There's no getting around it: these articles tend to be much longer than what you find from a newspaper or magazine. If you've found an article that's only a couple of paragraphs, it's not scholarly. There's no hard rule, but scholarly articles should easily be at least 5 pages.

The Scholarly, Popular, or Trade? page of this guide has a detailed breakdown of characteristics.