Scholarly journals have collections of articles written by experts in academic or professional fields to keep others interested in that field, up-to-date on the most recent research, findings, and news. These articles are reviewed by a journal editorial board or experts in the specific discipline (peer-reviewed).
Popular Sources are articles, blog posts, and news feeds that are written primarily by journalists to inform the general public about interesting and newsworthy events. These articles may or may not be subject to a review process and should be heavily evaluated before use. Popular articles are not peer-reviewed.
|
|
Scholarly |
Popular |
|
Who is the Author? |
Researchers, Scholars and Professors |
Primarily journalists |
|
Who is the targeted audience? |
Students, scholars, and researchers |
The general public |
|
What is the purpose of the article? |
To advance understanding in a field of study |
To inform the public and sell newspapers/magazines |
|
Are there citations? |
Always |
Not often |
|
Are there ads? |
Rarely |
Most of the time |
|
Are current events covered? |
No - the peer review process takes time |
Yes |
|
Examples |
The Journal of American History |
National Geographic |
150 million pages and 150,000 titles of legal history and government documents. More than 2,400 law-related periodicals (Congressional Record, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, coverage of U.S. Reports from 1754), treaties, constitutions, case law, world trials, classic treatises, international trade, foreign relations, U.S. Presidents, and more.
The world's most valuable and comprehensive scholarly, multi-disciplinary database. Indexes newspapers, magazines, and scholarly journals in all disciplines. Contains a significant amount of full-text. Content available from 1915-present.
Bibliographic records covering areas related to peace research, including conflict resolution, international affairs, peace psychology, and other areas of relevance to the discipline. EBSCO has digitized the full archive of this index, including coverage dating back to 1964.
Includes bibliographic records covering essential areas related to race relations, including ethnic studies, discrimination, immigration studies, and other areas of key relevance to the discipline.
Designed to offer current news pertaining to all branches of the military and government, this database offers a thorough collection of periodicals, academic journals, and other content pertinent to the increasing needs of those sites.
Covers all humanities. Includes full text for 1,400+ journals, with citations to more than 3.5 million articles. Includes book reviews.
Designed specifically for public libraries, MasterFILE Premier contains full text for nearly 1,950 periodicals covering general reference, business, health, education, general science, multicultural issues and much more.
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