♦ Scholarly journal articles are written by and for people in the same and or related academic or professional fields.
♦ They use terminology specific to the field.
♦ They aim to contribute to the scholarly conversation by advancing knowledge.
♦ They are usually peer-reviewed (aka "refereed") or undergo an editorial review by specialists
in the discipline or profession.
♦ They carefully document (cite) their sources, and these cited references may point to earlier sources
relevant to your topic.
♦ Scholarly journal articles also may include links to files with useful supplementary information.
Ulrich's International Periodicals Directory
Search for your journal title to see if it is scholarly/academic and refereed (peer-reviewed).
Scholarly journals include articles that are reports and discussions of the results of original research, are written by those who carried out the studies, and are based on the results of their experiments or observations.
These articles are also called primary research articles.
In the social sciences, they are often referred to as empirical articles, and the studies use qualitative or quantitative research methods.
Anatomy of a Scholarly Article (interactive graphic). NCSU Libraries
How to Read a Scientific Paper (pdf slides) Purdue University Libraries
A. Search for your journal title in Ulrich's International Periodicals Directory to see if it is scholarly/academic and refereed (peer-reviewed).
B. Use the Scholarly/Academic Journals limit within many databases
Most article databases allow you to limit your results to only scholarly/academic journals.
(Use other methods to verify if some results seem wrong: this method does not always work well.)
C. Check the journal's website
Search for the journals website. It will describe the purpose of the journal.
Look in the About This Journal section, or in the Instructions to Authors to see if the .journal is peer-reviewed,
Even if you have determined that the journal in which an article was published is scholarly, these journals usually also contain other types of articles such as editorials, commentary, review articles, book reviews, and news.
A. Clues you might find in the abstract include words such as:
study, results, methods/methodology, data, experimental, field trial
B. Look at the format of the article. Does it follow the typical format? (see previous tab)
From NCSU: https://www.lib.ncsu.edu/tutorials/scholarly-popular/