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Gender Studies

What is a scholarly journal?

Scholarly journals have collections of articles written by scholars or experts in academic and professional fields. The articles can be presenting new research findings from empirical studies or make critical examinations of previous research, or focus on developing new theories.

 A scholarly journal article undergoes a "peer-review" - process, where other scholars in the field are ascertaining the scholarly quality of the article, before its publication.

An Original article presenting new research findings are also characterized by following a text-structure with certain sections:

  • Abstract (summary of content)
  • Introduction (purpose and problem)
  • Method and Material 
  • Results
  • Analysis and Discussion
  • References

A Literature review do not present a new study being made, instead it describes, analyses, summarizes and evaluates previous research in a specific subject area. It will give you an overview of the research and references to prominent scholars in that subject field. Literature reviews can be published both in books and scholarly journals, in books with titles like Handbook of research in..., Annual review of research in..., Advances of research in...

When searching for individual articles in databases you can try to combine your search terms with the words "literature review" or "systematic review" to see if you're in luck.

What is Scholarly Publishing? How do I differ a scholarly journal from a popular magazine?

Tools for comparing scholarly journals

Open Access, copyright and self-archiving

Scholarly material and academic writing

Social Sciences Faculty Library

Peer review in 3 minutes

This video was created at North Carolina State University Libraries: