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SPE 101: Speech Communication: Scholarly vs. Popular

Resources for your SPE 101 class

What is a scholarly article?

Scholarly vs Popular Periodicals

 

Professors often suggest that students include articles from scholarly, refereed or peer- reviewed journals as resources for their research papers.   These articles are authored by experts in their field and reviewed by peers before getting accepted for publication.  See below for a chart to help you distinguish between the two types of periodicals.

 

 

Popular Magazine

Scholarly Journal

Examples

Audience

General readership

Students, researchers, scholars, specialists in a particular subject

Language

Popular language, geared towards the average reader

Specialized vocabulary of a subject discipline

Content

Feature stories, reviews, editorials, may report research findings as news

Original research, theoretical issues, new developments in the subject discipline

Authors

Staff writers (not always named), freelance writers

Subject specialists named, degrees and academic affiliation usually given

Documentation

Articles rarely include references or footnotes

Meticulously documented; extensive references and/or footnotes

Appearance

Highly visual, lots of advertising and photos

 

Somber design, little advertising, mostly text with some graphs and tables

  Scholarly vs. Popular

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