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, 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. However, peer reviewers do not repeat experiments or studies to see if the results are accurate. For more information on scholarly articles, check out OSU's scholarly article guide.

Video Example

Kay Wyly from the University of Washington Libraries has a great overview of different types of sources. Here's the scholarly article in Environmental Science & Policy that she mentions at 5:04, although it looks slightly different than the version in the video.

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 research based on experimentation or observation. For example, science experiments, ethnographies, and surveys are all examples of empirical research.
Literature review articles summarize, evaluate, and interpret an existing group of empirical research articles on a given topic.
Meta-analysis articles present the statistical analysis of several empirical research articles. Like literature reviews, they're used to show patterns in others' research; however, meta-analyses contain a lot more math.

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"