Resources for High School Students

Popular vs. Scholarly Academic Articles

One of the greatest paradigm shifts upon entering college is learning how to recognize, locate, and utilize academic research articles for your assignments, projects, and research papers. The glossy magazines that you find in the grocery stores, waiting rooms, and beauty salons are examples of popular magazines. Your parents may receive a trade magazine in the mail related to their profession.  Academic journal articles will be new to many high school students and incoming freshman.  Before walking through the steps of finding articles, it is important to recognize the differences between Scholarly/Academic, Trade/Professional, and Popular/Mainstream Journals. Bow Valley College Library provides resources to  differentiate between the three most common types of articles:

scholarly vs trade vs popular magazineBorrowed with Permission from the Bow Valley College Library