Dance History & Practice

This scholarly source on children's exposure to secondhand smoke has many of the defining features of an academic/scholarly article.

The author's names and credentials are listed clearly, and the journal title is included. There is an abstract (summary of the article's contents) at the beginning of the article, and keywords are included. There are no advertisements, and it includes an introduction, methods section, results section, and a discussion section. Finally, the authors cite their sources, and it has a list of references at the end of the article.

This Time Magazine article about secondhand smoke is a good example of a popular source. You can easily find articles like this via a Google search, while scholarly sources are more easily accessed through library databases (or Google Scholar).

Like most popular sources, this article is a good bit shorter than the average scholarly article. Unlike a scholarly source, the author's credentials are not clearly listed. While scholars sometimes write popular sources, the author of a popular source is often not affiliated with a university.

Although there are no ads in this article, you will often find advertisements in a popular source, and you are also more likely to have pictures included.

Finally, there is no abstract, no methods or discussion section, and a list of references are not included.