What's the Difference?

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What's the difference?

We have now established why we use research articles and how we can evaluate them in collaboration with our student work. You can find research study speak almost anywhere: pharmaceutical ads, cereal boxes, television and radio ads, etc. Research study speak is everywhere in our world, and specifically in the popular (read: mainstream, widely accessible, free) media we take in on a daily basis.

The origin of research studies often gets lost as this information gets taken up in the mainstream press and used to substantiate a claim or cause, or even just to educate the greater public on a current event/concern that has gained wider attention. Since we have already gone through the exercise of evaluating a research article, we should already be on our way to thinking critically about an original research study in a scholarly journal and be able to compare this to how research studies are used in popular journals and magazines. This may not be new information for you, but there are key differences between scholarly journals and popular magazines. We often talk about People Magazine and National Geographic as examples of popular magazines, while scholarly (peer-reviewed, refereed, academic) journals would include New England Journal of Medicine, Alternative Medicine, and other publications that demand a lot more from its readers. Remember that scholarly journals/articles are a professional conversation, so the intent and focus of this kind of content is going to be on sharing current information with peers in the field.

There are a number of ways of distinguishing between scholarly and popular articles. Rutgers University Libraries Links to an external site. does a great job of identifying what the differences are between the two types of publications. The primary differences come down to the following criteria, which appears on our Library - Learning Commons flyer in the lower left corner:

The best way to access scholarly information is to go right to the source, as close to the origin of the information or case study as possible. We might understand that People or National Geographic are not the best sources of research information for our student work, but that doesn't mean they don't report on important research studies. You can find research studies reported in a variety of formats and types. The Research Reading module emphasizes finding research articles through scholarly journals and publications, and in the assignment that follows we are going to examine the difference between a research study published in a popular magazine versus a scholarly journal.

How will I know if it's a scholarly journal/article?

Using the table above should provide tips for identifying if a journal/article is scholarly or popular. If you are looking for scholarly journals/articles through Google Scholar or some other method you will have to do a little more work to make absolutely certain it falls in that scholarly category. Rutgers University Libraries Links to an external site. (see Journal Types: A Comparative Chart Links to an external site.) provides a great table for distinguishing between popular, scholarly, and professional; it is highly recommended you review this chart if you are working with a journal/article found through Google Scholar or or another method.

One way you can make absolutely certain you have control over if you are accessing a scholarly journal/article or popular magazine is by visiting The Library - Learning Commons Links to an external site. and accessing our research databases Links to an external site.. There are a few research databases accessible through The Library - Learning Commons; the ones that will be most useful to you are ProQuest, ScienceDirect, and EBSCOhost.

In ProQuest and EBSCOhost you can limit your search results to both full-text and peer-reviewed. Articles in ScienceDirect are all scholarly, therefore no check box is needed; that said, be on the lookout for reviews and editorials that appear in your search results (ScienceDirect does a great job of noting if an article is a review article, original article, or research article).

If you are ever in doubt, in ProQuest and EBSCOhost you can find out if a journal an article appears in is scholarly by clicking on the hyperlinked journal title in the abstract.

Clicking on the title of the journal in the abstract/record for the article will take you to the Publication Information page, which contains information about the larger journal of which this article is apart. Once you get to the Publication Information page you will click on Show all to open up the full record and see all the information about this journal publication.

Once you have opened up the record to see all of the information, you will see a heading for Source type: and this will tell you if the journal you are getting this article from is a scholarly journal, popular magazine, trade journal, newspaper, etc.

If you are in ProQuest or EBSCOhost this is one of the primary ways you can track down a scholarly article. You can also search exclusively in a particular journal on a topic of your choosing. For example, in the screenshot examples above I was looking for an article in a scholarly journal on H1N1 Flu Virus and found a journal article, which then lead me to the Journal of Community Health. If I wanted to I could search in this journal only for all articles on the topic of H1N1 Flu Virus in the search box that appears below the Publication Information.

Now that we've covered the differences between scholarly and popular articles and how to find these types of publications, we are ready to tackle the Popular vs. Peer-Reviewed assignment!