On-line Research Writing:  English 102 
Professor Gary Parks (gparks@shoreline.edu)
Shoreline Community College 
Shoreline, WA, USA 

A scholarly journal is what the Writing Research Papers text calls a "professional journal." It is a periodical dedicated to publishing research and ideas in a particular field. There are thousands of these in the U.S. but you won't find them in the supermarket, of course. They are generally kept in libraries and by professionals in the field.

You can tell right away, usually, whether a periodical is a scholarly journal or not. They generally look plain on the outside and have few or no illustrations. They don't sell advertising. The writing generally involves a lot of research and is done by people who have degrees in the field. They often (but not always) are called a "Review" or "Quarterly" or "Journal of " something.

Example titles include

• Social Sciences Review
• Journal of Ethics
• Western Humanities Review
• Foreign Policy Review
• Physics Quarterly

and so on. The above are only examples.

Here is a list of scholarly journals available on the World Wide Web. These journals would not satisfy the Treasure Hunt assignment (which is designed to get you to use a library, print indexes, etc.), but they will give you an indication of the nature and extent of these periodicals. There are far more available in print.

SCC's library is, for a small library, strong in its journal holdings. In any library, the reference librarian should be able to help direct you toward the professional/scholarly journals.