Scholarly articles (also known as academic articles) are written by experts in a discipline for other experts in that field. They're usually published by a professional association or academic press. Their content focuses on research, has citations (like a bibliography or footnotes), and are professional in appearance with no spelling or grammatical errors, advertisements, or unrelated images.
Some scholarly articles go a bit further to be peer-reviewed. All peer-reviewed articles are scholarly articles, but not all scholarly articles are peer-reviewed.
NOTE: An article can be from a peer reviewed journal and not actually be peer reviewed. Editorials, news items, and book reviews do not necessarily go through the same review process. A peer reviewed article should be longer than just a couple of pages and include a bibliography.
There are several ways to determine whether or not an article is peer reviewed (also called refereed).
1. If you found the article using OneSearch, it will have a peer-reviewed icon:
2. If you found the article in a library database, there may be some indicator as to whether the article is peer reviewed.
3. In the library databases, you might find that the journal name is a hyperlink as shown below. Clicking on it takes you to a page about the journal which should make it clear whether the journal is scholarly, academic, peer reviewed, or refereed.
4. You can look up the journal name in the library database called Ulrichs Web: Global Serials Directory (previously called Ulrichs Periodical Directory). Search for the journal title and find the correct entry in the results list. There may be multiple versions of the same journal--print, online, and microfilm formats--but there also may be two different journals with the same title.
Look to left of the title, and if you find a referee shirt icon, that means that the journal is peer-reviewed or refereed.
5. The publisher's website for the journal should indicate whether articles go through a peer review process. Find the instructions for authors page for this information.