Your professor said something about using periodicals or scholarly journals. What is a periodical? It's something that's published periodically or regularly, like daily, weekly, monthly or yearly. It's a magazine, a newspaper, a scholarly journal, the annual proceedings of a meeting, or anything else that's published on a regular schedule.
Since you will be required in many of your classes to find scholarly journal articles on a topic, we'd better start with distinguishing the popular from the scholarly. What's a popular magazine for the general public? It's all the magazines you might find on a newsstand or at your neighborhood store. It's Time, Newsweek, Good Housekeeping, Sports Illustrated, Vogue, Better Homes and Gardens, etc. Some of them are about current news, and some address special interests, but they're all grouped together under the term "popular" or "general" magazines. You might use a popular news magazine or newspaper to research current events and contemporary issues.
Scholarly journals are written for a different audience. As the term implies, they're written for scholars. Who are these scholars? They're researchers and educators, doctors and lawyers, business leaders and psychologists, and people who just want to learn. Some of these journals are published by colleges, such as the Harvard Business Review. Others are published by professional associations, such as Science, published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science; or the Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, published by the American Psychology Association. Still others are published by institutes such as the American Journal of Archaeology which is published by the Archaeological Institute of America.
Each journal follows a certain set of rules. Like the papers you write for your classes, these journals require that all the sources be cited and that there's a bibliography or a listing of references. (You'll never see that in a newspaper or popular magazine.) Many require that the authors explain their research methods as well as their findings and conclusions.
Some scholarly journals publish research findings of new experiments or studies; these are considered a primary source. Others are considered secondary sources, since they are articles analyzing something that already exists, for example, an article written about a theme in a novel or a poem.
If your professor wrote an article and sent it to a scholarly journal, it would usually be reviewed by two or more experts on the particular subject covered. These experts or scholars evaluate the article and make a recommendation whether it should be published. For this reason, scholarly journals are also called "juried" or peer reviewed.
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