The criteria given below will give you the clues you need to identify a scholarly journal. They have very few advertisements compared to popular magazines.
Scholarly articles are usually several pages long.
They also have footnotes and bibliographies at the end of the text. Content A. Scholarly articles report on original research or experiments. Articles in popular magazines are usually news or opinion pieces based on someone else's findings. The language of scholarly articles is technical and specialized. Authors of such articles expect their readers to already know a lot about the subject.