| Popular Magazine | Scholarly Journal | |
| Advertising | Lots of advertisements | No advertisements |
| Appearance | Colorful; many photos; glossy pages | Plain; black-and-white text; charts and graphs |
| Audience | Written for a general audience; audience may depend on the subject of the magazine (cars, music, gardening, etc.) | Written for experts in a specific field, such as psychology, criminal justice, etc. |
| Author | Articles are written by a journalist | Articles are written by experts in that field |
| Content | Short articles on popular subjects. Vocabulary will be easy to understand. | Longer articles that often contain original research, experiments or studies. Vocabulary might be more difficult to understand, since it is specific to that field |
| Editing | Articles are edited by a general magazine editor, someone who often has a background in journalism. | Articles are edited by other experts, or peers, in that field. (These articles may be called "peer-reviewed" for this reason.) |
| Price | Cheap. Issues might cost between $3-5, with a year's subscription around $20. | Expensive. A year's subscription might cost between $100-1,000! |
| References | There is usually no list of references/works cited at the end of the articles. | There will always be a list of references that the authors used when writing their article. |