Finding Scholarly Sources
Magazine & Journal Articles
As you do research early in your college career, you will be able to use articles from a mixture of popular and scholarly sources. Probably you will use more of the popular than of the scholarly. But as you advance in your education, professors will increasingly require that you use articles from scholarly journals instead of magazines. So you need to know how to distinguish between these two types of publication.
Follow the link below to a chart presenting the differences.
The Differences Between Magazines & Journals
Primary and Secondary Sources
Another distinction which professors will make between sources used in research is that of "primary" and "secondary" sources.
Here is a link to a document that will define these types of documents: