News & Blog

Welcome to Diamond’s Hidden Gems, a blog series in which I introduce you to the University of Central Florida’s library services that you may not know about!

With so much focus on research and academic writing in our college careers, there is one vital piece of information that is rarely ever brought up: the types of scholarly documents. While this may seem like elementary information for some of you, I doubt most of us entered college knowing about periodicals. Below, I provide a run-down of all the terminology you need to know to make your research much easier.

• A periodical is any publication that comes out regularly or occasionally.
• A magazine is a periodical with a popular focus, aimed at the general public, and containing news, personal narratives, and opinions.
• Magazine articles are the individual stories or reports that are inside the overall magazine. They are often written by professional writers who may not have formal expertise in the subject.
• A journal is a scholarly periodical aimed at specialists, researchers, and students.
• Journal articles are the individual research papers that make up the larger journal. They contain original research, conclusions based on data, footnotes or endnotes, and often an abstract or bibliography.

Though magazines and journals are both periodicals and contain articles, there are vital differences between the two that you must understand in order to complete your research accurately. If you’d like to learn more about these types of documents and the distinctions between them, please visit Diamond’s Hidden Gems – Journals vs. Articles in STARS!

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