Scholarly journals are published by universities and other professional organizations for an audience of other experts. They contain scholarly articles. Scholarly sources are more reliable than most other sources because the results are based on research, not conjecture or opinion.

Popular articles include magazine articles, news articles, and pretty much everything else. Depending on your discipline and purpose, they may be relevant to your research. However, they aren't suitable for many academic contexts.

Scholarly journals and articles are often called peer-reviewed journals and articles, although there is a slight difference. Peer review is the quality-control process used by most scholarly journals. Authors submit their research to the journal editor, who then sends the article to the author's peers—researchers and scholars who are part of the same discipline—for review. The reviewers evaluate this quality based on a number of factors, including:

Did the researchers use appropriate methods?
Is the research original and important?
Is the data valid?
Are the authors' conclusions reasonable, based on the data?

The peer review process exists for every academic discipline, although different disciplines concentrate on different elements. For example, a biology journal will most likely be more focused on a researcher's quantitative data, while an English literature journal is more likely to value strong, well-argued rhetoric. Peer reviewers do not repeat experiments or studies to see if the results are accurate. The process is important because it validates the research and gives it a sort of "seal of approval" from others in the research community.

Types of Research Articles

The following types of articles are usually lumped under the heading "research articles" but actually vary in significant ways:

Empirical research articles describe the results of empirical research -- researche based on experimentation or observation. These articles usually have a standard "research paper" format: Abstract, Introduction/Literature Review, Methods, Results, Discussion/Conclusion, References.
Literature review articles summarize, evaluate, and interpret an existing group of empirical research articles on a given topic. These articles do not have the standard research paper format but are typically organized by the themes present in the body of existing empirical research.
Meta-analysis articles present the statistical analysis of the combined results of a carefully selected existing group of empirical research articles. These articles usually have a standard "research paper" format.

Examples of Research Articles

There's no need to read these articles now, but it may be helpful to see what they look like.

Empirical research article: "Effects of a cognitive-behavioral, school-based, group intervention with Mexican American pregnant and parenting adolescents"
Literature review article: "Child and adolescent emotion regulation: The role of parental emotion regulation and expression"
Meta-analysis article: "Gender differences in emotion expression in children: A meta-analytic review"

Is All Research Peer-Reviewed?

While scholarly journals publish many peer-reviewed articles, not all research is published in journals. Government agencies, non-governmental organizations, and non-profit organizations also publish research. This research doesn't always go through traditional peer review, but may go through a process of internal review before publication.

Examples of Non-Peer-Reviewed Research

Here are some more examples of what research can look like. Again, there's no need to read these now.

The CDC publishes its own research series in MMWR: "Health Care, Family, and Community Factors Associated with Mental, Behavioral, and Developmental Disorders in Early Childhood — United States, 2011–2012"
The United Nations (UN) publishes research on a wide range of topics, many of which involve families and children: "Trends in Maternal Mortality: 1990 to 2015"
The PEW Research Center publishes research on a wide range of topics: "What Unites and Divides Urban, Suburban and Rural Communities"

To learn more about scholarly and popular articles, consult OSU's scholarly article guide.