Sometimes you cannot easily tell whether a publication is a scholarly journal or a popular magazine even when looking at it.
A primary reason for the difficulty of distinguishing between these two "types" is the fact that there are really more than two "types." Periodicals can also be categorized as:
The distinctions between different types of publications can get blurry, and individual publications can display features of more than one type. For example, a newsletter which gives the news of an industry may be a lot like a trade journal in its content and format, while a popular magazine with lots of editorials on controversial topics may look like a journal of opinion.
NMSU Library contains a number of trade journals within its full-text databases and periodicals collections. You can think of a trade journal as being a cross between a scholarly journal and a popular magazine; it displays some features of each.
If you do get stuck trying to determine what type of periodical you have, you can:
Consider the database in which you found the citation.
Some article databases focus coverage on certain types of publications. For example, Lexis-Nexis covers newspapers, newsletters, and popular magazine articles, while InfoTrac Expanded Academic ASAP includes citations to both popular magazines and scholarly journals, and MLA Bibliography focuses on scholarly journals.
Consult reference books which tell what type of periodical an individual title is.
Ulrich's International Periodicals Directory (Z6941.U5; available at the NMSU Library Reference Desk)
Magazines for Libraries (PN4832.M23; available at the NMSU Library Reference Desk)
Also, not every article in a scholarly journal is itself scholarly. Many scholarly journals carry book reviews, which are not themselves scholarly; similarly many scholarly journals carry brief non-scholarly articles on current research.
Self-Test
A Question:
Jennifer has found a citation to an article in Oscar: The Sportswriters Quarterly. From looking at the publication, she still cannot tell whether it is a scholarly journal or a popular magazine. Oscar seems to have features of both types of periodicals. She found the citation in InfoTrac Expanded Academic ASAP, a database which covers many different types of periodicals. Where can she look next to see what type of periodical Oscar is?
Page created by: Kate Manuel.
Last update: Tuesday, December 07, 2004
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