Scholarly articles, sometimes known as peer-reviewed, refereed or academic articles, have the following charachteristics:
1. Written by researchers/scholars
2. Reviewed by other researchers/scholars - this process is called peer-review
3. Published in scholarly, peer-reviewed journals
4. Written for an audience of other researchers/scholars
5. Created to share research with others in the scholarly discipline
From the NCSU Libraries
Many library databases will let you limit to scholarly/peer-reviewed articles. This is a great first step but you still need to check if its peer-reviewed yourself. Try one of these ways:
1. Google the journal title and read about the journal's process for accepting and publishing work. It should mention peer review, not just review by an editor.
2. Look up the journal title in a library database called UlrichsWeb. If it is peer-reviewed (refereed), there will be a little referee shirt there -
Review articles are an attempt by one or more writers to sum up the current state of the research on a particular topic. Ideally, the writer searches for everything relevant to the topic, and then sorts it all out into a coherent view of the “state of the art” as it now stands. Review articles do not report the result of one particular study.
Research articles report the results of a particular study. They include a methods section that outlines how they did their study and a results section to report the outcomes.
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