What are Journals?

What is a Journal?

A journal is a publication that is published both in a particular format and is issued at fixed intervals (eg. weekly, monthly, and yearly). Journals can also be referred to as periodicals, magazines and serials. There are many different types of journals available. Understanding the type of journal will help you identify whether or not the articles will be of value to you in your research.

Types of Journals

• Peer Reviewed Journals

“A publication is considered to be peer reviewed if its articles go through an official editorial process that involves review and approval by the author's peers (people who are experts in the same subject area). Most (but not all) scholarly publications are peer reviewed.” (Proquest database information, 2007)

• Scholarly/Academic Journals

A publication is scholarly when the articles’ authors are academics/scholars /researchers /experts in the field. There may be a review or refereeing process. The articles will be supported by bibliographies and will assume readers’ prior knowledge of the subject.

• Magazines or Popular Journals

Popular journals or magazines are available in many formats. The content is often written by the magazine staff. The content is entertaining with minimal analysis. A magazine usually contains a miscellaneous collection of articles, stories, poems, and pictures and is directed at the general reading public

• Trade Journals

These are written to give information aimed at specific professions, trades or businesses. They are often practical in nature and are written by specialists in particular fields. They focus on matters concerning a particular industry or group of industries. Also called a "trade publication"

• Current Affairs/Opinion

These are written to give general information covering a range of topics. They are often written by journalists but can have articles by scholars. There may be a specific bias (e.g. with political journals).

• Professional Organisation / Society Journals

These are produced by particular professional organisations to give information to specific professions. The articles may be written by staff journalists or by experts in certain fields.

• Newspapers

Newspapers are designed to cover breaking news. The quality of information ranges from high to sensationalist content. The articles are usually written by staff journalists with no author acknowledgement. There can also be features written by specialists whose name is given -- a “Byline” -- which gives the name, and often the position, of the writer of the article.

Journal Articles

In Peer Reviewed and Scholarly journals you can be confident that published articles are of a high research standard and academic in focus. (Note: Not all articles in a peer reviewed journal are refereed, e.g. letters to editors.) How do you know if an article found in a journal is from a peer reviewed journal? How can you identify peer reviewed journals? The following can assist you to find whether or not a journal is peer reviewed.

• Ulrich’s Periodical directory Available online through the Library Catalogue

Provides information on serials published throughout the world. It covers all subjects, and includes publications that are published regularly or irregularly. Nearly a quarter of a million consumer and trade magazines, academic and scholarly publications, monographic series, newsletters, newspapers, electronic publications, 'zines, and many other types of serial publications and services published throughout the world on all subjects, are profiled. Details covered include standard bibliographic data, price, plus where a given title is indexed and/or abstracted. Ulrich's International Periodical Directory is a very useful guide to serial literature. It is also one of the few sources for determining the status of a serial title e.g. whether a title is a trade publication, peer reviewed etc.

• Using a Database to find articles

o Some databases identify peer reviewed journal titles
o Some databases allow you to Limit your search to refereed/peer reviewed articles by either ticking a checkbox or using Advanced Search to search a Publication Type field.
o Check the Database Help information for ways of identifying article types.
(Note: Databases often make mistakes when deciding whether or not an article is peer reviewed. To make sure, check the journal’s website.)

• Individual journals

o Examine the individual journal’s website. The information aimed at authors wanting to submit articles should indicate whether or not there is a review process.


Tips for Evaluating Other Journal and Newspaper Articles

The following criteria should be applied to articles where you are not sure they have been through a review/referee process:

• Where did you find the article?

o Finding the article in a subject index, e.g. PsycInfo, the article is more likely to be a scholarly or even peer reviewed article.
o If the article is from a general index, e.g. a Newspaper source, then it is not likely to be peer reviewed, but it may be scholarly.

• Author

o Is the author named?
o Are the author’s qualifications / credentials / professional associations given?
o Can you identify an institution, if any, to which the author belongs?
o Is contact information for the author included?

• What is the purpose of the article?

o Is the article designed to sell a product or service?
o Is the article giving facts that you already know are correct?
o Is the article in a journal you know to have a bias?
o Is the article presenting research findings?

• Audience

o Who is the intended audience?
o General public and at what age level?
o Other academics or scholars?

• Language

o Is the language of a high scholarly order?
o Is the language sensationalist?
o Is the language level low and sometimes inflammatory?

• Type of Journal

o What does the journal look like?
o Who is the publisher? Is it a professional organisation / commercial publisher / university / scholarly society?
o Are there pictures/images? Are they appropriate to content as in research findings or are they sensationalist?
o Is there advertising? If so, who is the advertising aimed at?

• Article appearance

o Are there footnotes and/or a bibliography?
o Is there an abstract?

*(source: The University of Queensland Libraray)

Mixture Problems

MIXTURE PROBLEMS involve creating a mixture from two or more things, and then determining some quantity (percentage, price, etc) of the resulting mixture.

Your school is holding a "family friendly" event this weekend. Students have been pre-selling tickets to the event; adult tickets are $5.00, and child tickets (for kids six years old and under) are $2.50. From past experience, you expect about 13,000 people to attend the event. But this is the first year in which tickets prices have been reduced for the younger children, so you really don't know how many child tickets and how many adult tickets you can expect to sell. Your boss wants you to estimate the expected ticket revenue. You decide to use the information from the pre-sold tickets to estimate the ratio of adults to children, and figure the expected revenue from this information.

You consult with your student ticket-sellers, and discover that they have not been keeping track of how many child tickets they have sold. The tickets are identical, until the ticket-seller punches a hole in the ticket, indicating that it is a child ticket. But they don't remember how many holes they've punched. They only know that they've sold 548 tickets for $2460. How much revenue from each of child and adult tickets can you expect?

To solve this, we need to figure out the ratio of tickets that have already been sold. If we work methodically, we can find the answer.

Let A stand for the number of adult tickets pre-sold, and C stand for the child tickets pre-sold. Then A + C = 548. Also, since each adult ticket cost $5.00, then ($5.00)A stands for the revenue brought in from the adult tickets pre-sold; likewise, ($2.50)C stands for the revenue brought in from the child tickets. Then the total income so far is given by ($5.00)A + ($2.50)C = $2460. But we can only solve an equation with one variable, not two. So look again at that first equation. If A + C = 548, then A = 548 – C (or C = 548 – A; it doesn't matter which variable you solve for). Organizing this information in a grid, we get:

	tickets sold	$/ticket	total $
adult	548 – C	$5	$5(548 – C)
child	C	$2.50	$2.50C
total	548	---	$2460

From the last column, we get (total $ from the adult tickets) plus (total $ from the child tickets) is (the total $ so far), or, as an equation:

($5.00)(548 – C) + ($2.50)C = $2460
$2740 – ($5.00)C + ($2.50)C = $2460
$2740 – ($2.50)C = $2460
–($2.50)C = –$280
C = ^–$280/_–$2.50 = 112

Then 112 child tickets were pre-sold, so A = 548 – 112 = 436 adult tickets were sold. (Using "A" and "C" for our variables, instead of "x" and "y", was helpful, because the variables suggested what they stood for. We knew instantly that "C = 112" meant "112 child tickets". This is a useful technique.)

Now we need to figure out how many adult and child tickets we can expect to sell overall. Since 436 out of 548 pre-sold tickets were adult tickets, then we can expect ⁴³⁶/₅₄₈, or about 79.6%, of the total tickets sold to be adult tickets. Since we expect about 13,000 people, this works out to about 10,343 adult tickets. (You can find this value by using proportions, by the way.) The remaining 2657 tickets will be child tickets. Then the expected total ticket revenue totals to $58,357.50, of which ($5.00)(10,343) = $51,715 will come from adult tickets, and ($2.50)(2,657) = $6,642.50 will come from child tickets.

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Let's try another one. This time, suppose you work in a lab. You need a 15% acid solution for a certain test, but your supplier only ships a 10% solution and a 30% solution. Rather than pay the hefty surcharge to have the supplier make a 15% solution, you decide to mix 10% solution with 30% solution, to make your own 15% solution. You need 10 liters of the 15% acid solution. How many liters of 10% solution and 30% solution should you use?

Let x stand for the number of liters of 10% solution, and let y stand for the number of liters of 30% solution. (The labeling of variables is, in this case, very important, because "x" and "y" are not at all suggestive of what they stand for. If we don't label, we won't be able to interpret our answer in the end.) For mixture problems, it is often very helpful to do a grid:

	liters sol'n	percent acid	total liters acid
10% sol'n	x	0.10	0.10x
30% sol'n	y	0.30	0.30y
mixture	x + y = 10	0.15	(0.15)(10) = 1.5

Since x + y = 10, then x = 10 – y. Using this, we can substitute for x in our grid, and eliminate one of the variables:   Copyright © Elizabeth Stapel 1999-2011 All Rights Reserved

	liters sol'n	percent acid	liters acid
10% sol'n	10 – y	0.10	0.10(10 – y)
30% sol'n	y	0.30	0.30y
mixture	x + y = 10	0.15	(0.15)(10) = 1.5

When the problem is set up like this, you can usually use the last column to write your equation: The liters of acid from the 10% solution, plus the liters of acid in the 30% solution, add up to the liters of acid in the 15% solution. Then:

0.10(10 – y) + 0.30y = 1.5
1 – 0.10y + 0.30y = 1.5
1 + 0.20y = 1.5
0.20y = 0.5
y = ^0.5/_0.20 = 2.5

Then we need 2.5 liters of the 30% solution, and x = 10 – y = 10 – 2.5 = 7.5 liters of the 10% solution. (If you think about it, this makes sense. Fifteen percent is closer to 10% than to 30%, so we ought to need more 10% solution in our mix.)

Usually, these exercises are fairly easy to solve once you've found the equations. 

*(Souce: Unknown)