Scholarly journal articles, also known as peer-reviewed articles, academic articles, or refereed articles, are essential for most academic research projects. Academic journals tend to be where new research is first published in-depth.
Most people are less familiar with academic journals than with other types of sources, such as books or newspapers. The information on this page will help you learn to identify academic journal articles.
Peer review is the publishing process used by most academic journals. Here's how it works:
Nearly all scholarly journal articles will have these features. If an article you are considering does not match this, investigate further to be sure the article is what you think it is.
Tools such as the library Discovery Service often label articles from peer-reviewed journals, but you can't always rely on those labels, and some resources don't provide them. To know for sure, it is best to consult the journal's website.
Not always!
Academic journals are known for publishing long, peer-reviewed research articles, but they also include shorter pieces such as letters to the editor, reviews, and news briefs. Sometimes these shorter pieces are peer reviewed and sometimes they are not. Databases and search engines tend to label everything published in a peer-reviewed journal as a peer-reviewed article, even if these smaller individual items aren't peer-reviewed.
Even when they are peer-reviewed, they may not be appropriate for your needs. A single page brief about an upcoming study will not provide the same depth of information as a full-length article, and may not have citations backing up the work. Use your own judgement and don't rely on labels alone.
Scholarly articles can look formulaic, but they are not all the same! Below are some common types of scholarly articles you may encounter. As you might expect, some types of articles are more common in certain disciplines than others.
Also called empirical studies, a research article describes the design and outcomes of a research study/experiment.
Instead of performing a new, original study, review articles summarize multiple previous studies. Some types of review articles you may encounter include literature reviews, systematic reviews, and meta-analyses.
Some articles explore a topic or concept through a theoretical lens, usually building upon existing theoretical frameworks to present new ideas.
Scholarly journals can include other, often shorter pieces of writing. These can provide insight, but they typically don't offer the same depth as full articles, and they don't have extensive bibliographies. Don't rely on these if what you really need is a full-length article!
Examples of these shorter pieces include:
In the Discovery Service, some articles display the orange Open Access logo. This means an article was published with a special type of copyright license called Creative Commons, which makes the article freely available for anyone to read and share.
Open Access is a new kind of publishing model that seeks to make scholarly information more accessible to a global audience. Typically, the cost of publishing academic journals is covered by journal subscription fees paid by libraries. Subscriptions are not required to read OA articles and journals. Instead, publishing costs are covered by grants and author fees (when an author or the author's academic institution pays for an article to be published).
