Scholarly journals are a type of periodical. Periodicals are published on a regular basis with a fixed interval between the issues. Other types of periodicals are popular magazines and newspapers.

Periodicals are available in a variety of formats. Some are available only in paper form, while others must be accessed online or on microform. Check the Journal Finder to find out the availability and location of particular periodicals in our library’s collection.

Most instructors at the college level require that the majority of the periodical articles you use in writing a research paper come from scholarly journals. These are also known as "professional" journals, "peer reviewed" journals or "referred" journals. Most of our online research databases contain a limiter you can select so that you only find items from these types of journals.

Selecting the "Peer Reviewed" limiter doesn't mean that every item you find is going to be peer reviewed. Items such as "letters to the editor", book reviews, editorials, etc. are not peer reviewed even though they are found in peer reviewed journals. So, it will also help if you select "Journal Article" in the "Document Type" limiter if the database you are using has such a limiter.

The following guidelines give some clues to help you distinguish scholarly, peer reviewed journals from other kinds of periodicals. If in doubt, ask your instructor or a librarian.

For instructions about how to search our library databases for articles, click here.

Characteristics of Scholarly Journals:

• Scholarly journals usually have a somber, serious appearance and often contain graphs or charts, but few glossy pictures or photographs.
• Will contain minimal, select advertising that is geared towards the subject discipline.
• Scholarly journals always cite their sources in the form of footnotes or bibliographies.
• Articles published in scholarly journals report on original research or experiments (as opposed to news or opinion pieces based on someone else’s findings).
• Articles published in scholarly journals are written by a scholar in a particular field of study or by someone who has done research in that field, discipline or specialty.
• The author’s name will appear at the beginning or the end of the article.
• The language of scholarly journals is technical and specialized because the articles are written for other scholars and not for the general public.
• Scholarly journals often (but not always) have titles with words like “Quarterly”, “Journal”, “Review” or “Proceedings”.
• Scholarly journals are often published by universities or professional societies.
• Scholarly journals are indexed mostly (but not only) in subject-specific indexes. For example, a good place to find scholarly psychology/counseling journal articles is the PsycINFO database because it specializes in psychology/counseling literature. And, the CINAHL database specializes in nursing/medical literature.

• They contain sections with labels such as "Method", "Sample", "Hypotheses", "Measures", "Procedure", "Results", "Discussion" that tell how the research/study was done.

Examples of periodicals that are scholarly journals:  

• JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association
• Review of Metaphysics
• Religious Education
• Nursing Administration Quarterly
• Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science
• Psychological Record