LibGuides: UGS 303: News Literacy: A Citizen's Guide / Reese: Popular vs. Scholarly

Definitions

Popular newspaper and magazine articles are typically written by journalists to entertain or inform a general audience. A journalist may read an article from the scholarly literature and break it down for a non-expert audience (like climate research or medical findings)
Scholarly articles are written by (and for) researchers or experts in a particular field. They use specialized vocabulary, have extensive citations, and are often peer-reviewed.

	Popular (magazine, newspaper)	Scholarly (journal)
Content	Current events; general interest articles	Research results/reports; reviews of research (review articles); book reviews
Purpose	To inform, entertain, or elicit an emotional response	To share research or scholarship with the academic and/or scientific community
Authors	Journalists, staff writers, freelancers	Professors, scholars, researchers in the field
Audience	General public	Scholars, academics, researchers in same or related field
Review Process	Staff of editors	Peer review: invited board made up of other scholars and researchers who review in a double blind process (reviewers do not know the author's name and author does not know who is reviewing and providing feedback)
Citations	Informal; hyperlinks or named references that you can search ('according to a 2008 study in JAMA led by XX')	Bibliographies, references, endnotes, footnotes organized and written according to strict citation rules of the discipline or publication.
Frequency	Daily/weekly/monthly	Quarterly/semi-annually
Ads	Many; for products, events. Important revenue for publication.	Minimal; maybe for scholarly books. Not a source of revenue for publication.
Examples	The New York Times, Vogue, Rolling Stone, The Economist	New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of American Medical Association, Journal of Southern History, Developmental Psychology