Scholarly or peer-reviewed journals contain articles written by experts in academic or professional fields.
Almost all of the library's databases will allow you to focus your search within academic, scholarly, or peer-reviewed journals. 
Limiting to academic/scholarly, however, may also retrieve professional journals. Some professors consider these scholarly, others don't. Ask for clarification.
Look for:
- Journal in the journal title. You can't apply this clue blindly, and it's imperfect-- Ladies' Home Journal is not scholarly; Sex Roles is.
- Subject specific terminology, jargon or language within the article title.
- High page numbers. Typically scholarly journals continuously paginate January through December. Thus, after the publication of the first volume, you'll see high page numbers. This is an important clue--probably the one you can count on most.
- References or Works Cited within the article.
- Abstract is contained within the article (useful only if you can pull up the PDF of the article).
- Authors identified within the article as having come from a university, college, or research facility. Imperfect. Look for other clues.
- Methods also called "methodology" or "materials and methods," this section describes the author's research methods: experiment, survey, data sources, etc.
- Results, findings, or data -- this is the section of the article in which raw data are presented.
- Conclusion -- the author's conclusions based on the analysis of the results/data.
Every scholarly research article will indicate what methods and tools were used to conduct the research, what the results were, and how the author interprets those results.
View some sample citations below to compare scholarly and non-scholarly journal articles. Still unsure? Check The Serials Directory for the definitive word on whether your source is scholarly or general.
Image source: Syker Fotograf. GNU GPL. Wikimedia Commons.
