When searching for articles relevant to your project, it's important to understand two things:

1. What is appropriate for your search
2. How to identify the difference between types of articles

What is appropriate?

For most academic research, articles from scholarly journals are considered appropriate sources of information. Articles from popular magazines are often not credible enough because they do not provide citations to back up their claims. However, sometimes magazine articles will identify a study or report they are drawing from in the body of their text. If you find a popular magazine that had information that seems useful, try to trace the claim to the original source to make sure it's accurately represented.

What is the difference?

There are several ways to distinguish between an article from a scholarly journal and one from a popular magazine. Here are a few things to pay attention to:

• Look at the publication the article belongs to. Scholarly journals often have more academic oriented titles whereas popular magazine titles are more entertaining.
• Scholarly journal articles will have citations at the end of them. Popular magazine articles rarely do.
• Popular magazine articles often have pictures and color.

If you need help identifying if a source is appropriate, you can ask the library for help.