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Characteristics that help you identify a periodical as scholarly:
- Often contain lengthy articles (five to fifty pages)
- Generally confine the subject matter to a single, very specific aspect of a subject area (e.g., music theory, European political science, film studies, language development)
- Contain articles with footnotes or cited reference pages. The cited references allow the reader to consult the same material that the author used in his/her research
- Are intended for an academic or scholarly audience
- Use technical or specialized vocabulary
- Publish articles written by academics, specialists or researchers in the field (as opposed to articles written by journalists reporting on or synthesizing research)
- Often publish reviews of the literature
- Often include articles with charts or tables: news photos and other types of graphics are not often used, save in the case of articles on visual subjects, such as art, design or architecture
- Are often produced under the editorial supervision of a professional association (e.g., Journal of the American Medical Association) or by a scholarly press (e.g., Elsevier, Pergamon)
- Contain little or no advertising
- Are issued less frequently than popular or trade periodicals
Again, hundreds of databases help the searcher locate articles in scholarly periodicals. A few of the most valuable include Academic Search Premier, Google Scholar, JSTOR, and Web of Science. Also, an individual scholar may provide links to the articles s/he has produced on a personal or institutional website, and the journals themselves may offer a searchable archive, although there is almost always a charge involved in getting access to a specific article from the journal’s own archive.
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