Popular, Trade and Scholarly Sources - What Are the Differences?

Overview: Many of the assignments for your courses may ask you to use specific sources or types of sources such as popular magazine articles or scholarly or professional journal articles. There are some basic ways that you can identify these types of periodicals.

Type of Source	Popular Magazines	Trade Journals	Scholarly Journals
Examples	The Economist, Psychology Today, Time, National Geographic	Advertising Age, The CPA Journal, Billboard, American Libraries	Journal of the History of Ideas, College English, Antiquity, Science
Audience	For the general public; use language understood by the average reader	For those in a particular trade or industry	For students, scholars, researchers; uses specialized vocabulary of the discipline
Content	May report research as news items,feature stories, editorials and opinion pieces	Reports on problems or issues in a particular industry	Reports original research, theory; may include an abstract
Appearance	Highly visual, a lot of advertising, color, photos, short articles with no bibliographies or references	Visual, contains advertising, color, photos,	Little or no advertising, has tables & charts, high concentration of print, lengthy articles, bibliographies & references
Authors	Author may not be named, frequently a staff writer, not a subject expert	Staff writers, freelance authors	Authors are specialists, articles are signed, & credentials such as degrees, university affiliation are often given.