What are Scholarly or Professional Journals?
The term here refers to scholarly journals, not to diaries or personal accounts. These are the characteristics of such journals:
Purpose: Report results of original research, examine existing theories and present new interpretations, review and analyze previous research studies on a topic.
Authors: Scholars with relevant credentials (degrees appropriate to the field of study).
Format: Articles always cite sources in footnotes or bibliographies, may include charts, graphs or tables, but usually few photographs.
Frequency: Many are published quarterly, but some are more frequent.
Language: Assume some scholarly background on the part of the reader, uses terminology of the field or discipline.
Publisher: Often, but not always, published by scholarly or professional organizations. Some commercial (for profit) publishers also produce scholarly journals. Journal publishers may require authors to pay production fees.
Selection: Many scholarly journals are “refereed,” that is, a panel of experts reads prospective articles and selects those with scholarly merit. (“Peer Reviewed” means the same thing as “refereed”.) The journal’s “editorial statement” may indicate whether a journal is refereed. The library owns guides which also give this information.
How are popular journals (magazines) different?
Audience: Articles are usually written by journalists or professional writers for a general audience.
Length: Articles are usually shorter than scholarly journal articles.
Author: The author is journalist or professional writer; it is not always clear who the author is.
Style: The Content is easy to comprehend by the general reader.