Mat-Su College: Writing

Magazines are written to entertain and inform a wide audience. Journalists or even hobbyists write magazine articles.

Magazines are very different from scholarly articles. Magazines don't go through peer-review. Magazines are generally written to make money, not because they advance scientific knowledge. As such, many people think information in magazines is lower quality than information in journals. But magazines have a place:

• They are easier to understand than scholarly journals. This makes them a good place for non-experts to learn about a topic.
• They cover news events long before scholarly journals. (Remember that scholarly journals report on experiments and go through review; both of these things take a long time.)
• Magazines sometimes contain interesting opinions and arguments that would not fit into the research-based writing of scholarly journals.

Academic Search Premier is a good place to find magazine articles.

More info on Academic Search Premier is available in the "Scholarly articles" page of this guide. Here I will just say that you can narrow your search results down to magazines by using the magazines checkbox on the left side of your search results page:

Compared to a journal article, a magazine article will often...

• Have flashy pictures or graphics
• Use jokes, anecdotes, or other means of grabbing your attention.
• Be short -- rarely more than a few pages.
• Not be written by an expert. Magazine articles will sometimes not even say who wrote them.
• Have short, catchy titles.