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How Can I Tell if an Article Is Scholarly?: Home

Scholarly Articles

There are different types of periodicals: popular, trade, and scholarly. So if you want to find scholarly articles, you need to make sure you are searching in scholarly journals or periodicals. Scholarly articles are also sometimes called peer-reviewed. Scholarly articles and journals are published by experts in their field as a way to communicate research in an open, accessible and transparent way and to keep a running account of research and thought related to a given topic. Peer-reviewed means that the article has been reviewed by other experts in the same field prior to publication. 

Clues

There are a few clues that you are looking at a scholarly or peer-reviewed article. These are:

  • The author(s) are named and include relevant credentials after their names or affiliations with universities
  • There is a lengthy list of citations or a bibliography at the end of the article
  • The article is lengthy
  • The article does not include pictures but charts, graphs and statistics
  • It follows a standard format for research articles with sections such as objectives, methods, results, discussion, and conclusion
  • It is published in a scholarly journal