 What are scholarly journals? John M. Fowl Library, CSUSB. So you've got an assignment that requires you to use a scholarly journal article as one of your sources. Now what? If you're feeling confused, that's not surprising. You won't see scholarly journals in the checkout lane at the grocery store or anywhere outside the world of academia. Scholarly journals are how professional researchers around the world communicate their findings with each other. Most of your professors have published in scholarly journals, here's one that I published in, with the goal of increasing the body of knowledge in their chosen field of study. You may hear them called peer-reviewed journals because articles submitted for publication must be reviewed by experts in the same field as the author. The idea is that the information in scholarly journals is of higher quality because of this review process. So how can you find and recognize scholarly articles? The library's article databases give you many ways to limit your search to scholarly journals only. Watch for these options on the screen as you do your searches. They may be labeled scholarly or peer-reviewed or even academic. Depending on the database, they might show up before you run the search or offer you the option after you run the search. Let's compare a couple of examples. This article, Deadly Mind Traps, is from the popular magazine Psychology Today. Although it's seven pages long, one, two, three, and then four pages are actually graphics that are decorative, not informational. When we get to the three pages of text, they're written in informal language broken up by catchy bullet point headings. And readers don't need any prior knowledge about the topic to understand it. It has no references to outside sources and the author isn't a professional researcher in this field. He's a blogger who writes regularly for the magazine. None of that makes this a bad article. If you want a brief attention-grabbing introduction to the problems of decision-making, this is great, but it isn't scholarly. This article from the journal Small Group Research is definitely scholarly. No decorative graphics here. It's 30 pages of nothing but information. It's an original research study designed and carried out by the authors themselves, all of whom work in the same field that they're studying. First, there's an abstract summarizing the study and results. The article begins with an overview of the issues being studied with extensive references to previously published literature on the topic. The article describes in detail the design and method of the study. Then it analyzes the data collected, which is presented in statistical tables. Finally, there's a discussion of how the findings are important. At the end, there's a long list of references that the authors consulted in the course of their research. And there's even a listing of the authors' professional credentials. Earlier on, it gives a way to contact the lead researcher for the team in case there are any questions. The language of the article is formal and sticks to the facts, and if you don't have some prior knowledge of the field, you might find it difficult to understand. Because scholarly articles are written by experts for other experts, basic concepts will not be explained. It's assumed that the readers of this article know them already.