For most papers and speeches, good researchers will use a combination of magazine and journal articles to find the most recent information on a subject. Sometimes an instructor will require that the students consult only professional or scholarly journals. Since many of the most frequently used periodical indexes index both magazines and journals without distinguishing between them, it is important to know how to tell a journal from a magazine. Both of them are kinds of periodicals, meaning that they are published at regular intervals, but there are many differences. See the chart below for a presentation of the differences.