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Popular Magazines vs. Scholarly Journals

	Popular Magazines	Scholarly Journals
Appearance	Often illustrated with glossy, color photographs, advertisements. Attractive in appearance.	Include charts, graphs, with few advertisements. Sober and serious in appearance.
Audience	General public.	Scholars, researchers, and students.
Authors	Are on the staff of the magazine or freelance writers.	Scholars or experts or researchers in the field.
Contents	Include short, non-technical articles written in an easy manner.	Include scholarly, scientific, or technical articles written in the language of the discipline.
Documentation	Articles are seldom footnoted and the sources for information are usually not given.	List references in footnotes, or endnotes, or bibliography. Reviewed by other scholars in the field before being published.
Purpose	Informing or entertaining the general public.	Reporting original, or latest research and experimentation.
Publishing	Edited by a magazine editor and published. Can be purchased in stores or at newsstands.	Reviewed by other scholars in the field before publishing. Often, but not always, published by a professional association.

Maintained by: Kaiping Zhang, kzhang@uoregon.edu
Last Modified: 02/22/2007