Hi, my name is Greta Boers, and I'm the librarian for classical studies and linguistics here at Duke University. I'm very glad to talk to you today. What we'd like to do is discuss the difference between scholarly and popular journals, so that you could use them in your writing. So why don't you join me, and we'll go inside Lilly Library, and we'll talk about the subject for today. Some of the terms and phrases that we'll cover today include: bibliography, evidence, hypothesis or thesis statement, methodology, newspapers, peer review, popular magazines, primary source material, review of the literature, scholarly articles, secondary source material, and serials. Well here in front of me, you see I have a whole bunch of different kinds of magazines and journals. “Serials” are what librarians call these—that is, anything that comes out serially. It could be a day, it could be a week, it could be a month, quarterly, yearly, every other year, but something that comes out routinely because the way that we catalog those things is very different than say, a monograph or a book. Let's take a look at the different kinds that I have in front of me. I have put the popular magazines here in the front, and there are things like Sports Illustrated, there's Entertainment Weekly, which is about the film industry. There is Time, which is one of our sociopolitical commentaries, journals, there's some New Yorker, which has articles from both scholars and popular writers, here's Esquire and the Atlantic, which are mostly political commentaries of some kind. Now what differentiates them from the scholarly journals that are behind them is the number of different things. You probably have magazines like this in your own country. A lot of people would say well, they're glossy, you know, that they're glossier, they're shinier in the cover, but that's not necessarily the criteria to differentiate between popular and scholarly magazines, journals, magazines. Another thing is that there are advertisements in them. The way that they get their funding is largely through advertisements. There's an editor or an editorial board, and they don't request submissions from authors; what they'll do is invite a writer down and to write a column, but most of the writers are staff writers. There's no bibliography. There's no need to prove that what you write in these particular magazines are true, although everyone tries to be as objective as possible, generally. There are some magazines that are popular that have a specific agenda or sociopolitical slant to them; the way that you find about them is reading the magazine to see. So scholarly articles are usually plainer in appearance, like these. This is a women studies journal called Signs. Here's the New Nietzsche Studies. International Philosophical Quarterly, even the Journal of Parapsychology have relatively plain covers on them. And some of the characteristics that are typical of scholarly articles, that the author has to state a hypothesis or a new idea. And that idea needs to be situated in the literature that's ongoing in that particular discipline. One of things that this review of the literature does is to outline what's actually known about the particular topic, so that it can offset the newness and the freshness of the idea that the professors, or the scholar, is trying to put forward. Another key part of the scholarly article is, in some cases, an analysis, or rhetorical analysis, of a text, or it may be an experiment in the lab, or it may be a series of interviews and a statistical analysis of those interviews, but the methodology or analysis section. Ideally, one of the things that the description of the methodology or the analysis does is to demonstrate that this is as subjective as possible and that the conclusion that the author is trying to draw is not prejudiced in one direction or the other. Then comes the bibliography—and this is one striking difference between current popular literature and the articles that are written— they don't have to substantiate what is actually in the article itself; they don't have to prove that—I’m trying to find an article here— They don't have to prove that they've actually read the literature and that there are other articles or relevant materials that authenticate, in a way, or substantiate what they've written. In scholarly article journal literature, there's always a bibliography, and like you can see in this Signs, there are footnotes constantly throughout every page. And here there's two pages of bibliography that show that the author has done a review of the literature and substantiated what he or she is trying to say. And then here in the Journal of Parapsychology, here again, there's a list of references. Now each of these journals can use a different bibliographic style, so for example in the International Philosophical Quarterly, all the substantiating literature is listed in the footnotes. In the Journal of New Nietzsche Studies, and in Signs, the bibliographic style requires there to be a list of references read. There’s the citations in the bibliography, but the citations in the bibliography—that is the footnotes— the references that are in the footnotes of an article, and the bibliography, can be used by the reader to identify other articles that may be of interest to you. So whether the article is in the social sciences, humanities, or the sciences, these sections are essentially going to be the same. There's an idea, a hypothesis; there is a review of the literature; there is a methodology or rhetorical analysis section; there is a bibliography. The first note in the bibliography is really a thank you of some kind, and that can be to researchers that have helped with the research process. It could be to an institute which has provided funding. It can also be the institution where the author is affiliated. And a lot of times you can determine how objective the article is by who is funding it. Now peer reviewed article takes this further. A peer review article—there's an editor or an editorial board— and they invite submissions from scholars all over in that particular discipline. And what they require in their directions for the authors is that there is a cover sheet and the article submitted, but there's no indication of who the author is or what their affiliation is. That way they can send these articles to other peers, in that particular discipline, and on the basis of their expertise, determine whether the article is worthy of being published. Both popular and secondary articles can be described as primary or secondary. A primary article in the sciences, say, would describe a first-hand account of an experiment. A primary article in, say, a popular magazine or a newspaper, is going to describe a first-hand account of an event, like a fire, or a political rally. Secondary articles are second-hand. Secondary articles provide the reader with a summation of an author's opinion or conclusion. So if a magazine article describes prevailing opinions, like in Time, then what they're doing is giving those summaries second-hand. A secondary article and scholarship is usually a summation of a series of other articles and how they influence the particular discipline. So there's something called a review article in history, which is not providing empirical evidence or an analysis of an historical event or historiography. What they're doing is describing, essentially, the state of the discipline or the state of that particular topic. I hope you found this explanation of the differences between popular and scholarly articles helpful to finding information about your topic. Remember that the quality of the information that you use for your writing is going to determine how you can use it. If it's authentic or authenticated by the scholar, if it's substantiated by a bibliography, you're going to use that information in a different way than you would for a popular account. Thank you very much for listening to me today, and I look forward to seeing you again, when we talk about the process of finding articles.
