Your professors may require you to use scholarly, peer-reviewed journal articles in your research.
It's easy to find this kind of article, because many databases give you the option to limit your search results specifically to scholarly journals. For example, when searching OneSearch, select Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals under the "Limit To" section in the left sidebar. Now everything in your search results will be scholarly articles only!
Here are some characteristics of scholarly journals:
- Journal title - frequently uses the word journal, review, bulletin, quarterly, or research
- Cover - drab, usually one or two color
- Frequency - usually published monthly or quarterly
- Pagination - sometimes journals will continue pagination through multiple issues of the same volume, others may restart this numeration with each issue or online each article.
- Content - may have charts, graphs, and bibliographies or footnotes; contains few ads that tell about conferences and books
- Article title - usually long, often describing the content of the article
- Author - specialist in the field, short biography may be given