Thanks to Acadia University's Psychology Research Guide at http://libguides.acadiau.ca/content.php?pid=54923&sid=1265370 for info on scholarly and popular journals and images from journals.
Distinguishing Scholarly Journals from Other Periodicals
Journals, magazines, and newspapers are important sources for up-to-date information in all disciplines. This guide is intended to help distinguish between the various levels of scholarship found in Sprague Library's databases and periodicals collection. The criteria for evaluating periodical literature can be divided into:
How to Evaluate Periodicals
The terms periodical, serial, magazine, and journal are often used interchangeably but there are differences among them. Journal articles tend to be written by experts in the field and be more scholarly than magazine articles. Scholarly articles are also called peer-reviewed or research articles.
Scholarly vs. Popular?
For assignments, you may have to find articles from academic journals. In some databases like Academic Search Premier or Proquest Central, you can limit to scholarly (Peer-reviewed) journals. Some databases like Project Muse have a scholarly focus so the articles indexed are from scholarly sources. Some databases like LexisNexis Academic mainly index newspaper articles.