ENVS 462 Planning Theory: Home

Ask Us - Call, chat, email, text, or tweet, all from one location.

Hacherl Research and Writing Studio - A place to find professionals and trained students to help with research and writing projects.

LIT - Library Information Tutorials: Quick guides to finding sources, building an argument, rhetorical moves, citing sources, etc.

Rob Lopresti - The librarian who works with Huxley College.

You will often be asked to search for academic, scholarly, refereed or peer-reviewed articles. How are they different from other articles?

Academic, Scholarly, Refereed, or Peer-reviewed Articles

• Academic articles appear in academic journals (as opposed to general interest or trade magazines)
• Articles in academic journals are selected (refereed) by experts in the field (peer reviewers).
• Academic articles are created by academics for academics.
• The research and information in these articles is considered to be trustworthy and well-researched.
• Academic journals often have the word "journal" in the title, like Journal of Environmental Health.
• Academic articles are long.
• Academic articles have citations (footnotes or endnotes).
• Academic articles are often primary literature, meaning the first reports of research.
• Academic journals rarely feature color pictures; many will feature charts and graphs.
• Authors often have an affiliation with a university or research institute.

 Trade Magazines

• Trade magazines provide news for professionals in a field, so they assume the reader is knowledgable.  (Columbia Journalism Review is a trade magazine for journalists, The Biologist is a trade magazine for biologists.)
• Articles are often shorter and don't have footnotes.

General-interest Magazines

• General-interest magazines include titles like Time, Newsweek, Forbes, and Rolling Stone.
• Articles are often shorter and written for a general audience.
• Don't dismiss an article in a general-interest magazine, but be aware of who it is written for and where it is coming from.

Many databases will allow you to limit to only articles in  peer-reviewed journals.  Ulrich's Web is a directory of journals (not a database of articles) that will always tell you whether a periodical is refereed.