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Video courtesy of Peabody Library at Vanderbilt University.

Peer Review in Brief

Video created by the North Carolina State University Libraries (time 3:16). This video is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States license. https://youtu.be/rOCQZ7QnoN0

Handout What's the Difference? Scholarly Journals vs. Popular Magazines

Parts of a Peer-Reviewed Article

NOTE: A journal can be peer-reviewed and still have non-peer reviewed articles in it. Generally if the article is an editorial, book review or brief news item, it has not been through the peer-review process.

What's the Difference? Scholarly Journals vs Popular Magazines

Your instructor may require you to use scholarly sources for an assignment as they are considered more authoritative than popular magazines.  For this reason it's important to recognize the differences between the two types of publications.

EXAMPLES OF POPULAR MAGAZINES:

View an article from each magazine below.  Login with your Titan User Name and Password.

Cover story from Time magazine Cover story from People magazine Cover story from Newsweek magazine

  • Visually appealing, heavily illustrated, lots of advertisements

  • Often written by journalists for a general audience

  • Language is easily understood by general readers

  • Rarely provides full citations for sources

  • Written for the general public

  • Articles tend to be short

EXAMPLES OF SCHOLARLY JOURNALS:

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Cover of Child Development Journal Cover of Behavioral & Information Technology Journal Cover of Journal of Child and Family Studies

  • May contain charts, diagrams, and often have a sober, serious look

  • Are written by and for faculty, researchers or scholars 

  • Use scholarly or technical language

  • Are often refereed or peer reviewed, meaning articles are reviewed by a community of experts in a given field before being accepted for publication

  • Includes full citations for sources 

  • Tend to be longer articles about research

Popular vs. Scholarly Sources

Video created by the Hartness Library of the Community College of Vermont and Vermont Technical College (time 3:50). Creative Commons Attribution license (reuse allowed) https://youtu.be/OdfEmLOy4sM

Information Cycle

Video created by the Digital Literacy Unit of the University Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (time 1:38). Standard YouTube License https://youtu.be/898CmcAam0s

Anatomy of a Scholarly Article

Learn all about the parts of a scholarly article by interacting with content in Anatomy of a Scholarly Article.