Academic Titles
Academic magazines, sometimes called scholarly journals, are typically found in libraries, universities, and colleges. Some experts and students do subscribe to scholarly journals — doctors, for instance, use them to keep up on the latest trends in treatment, peer-reviewed studies, and pharmaceutical trials — but for the most part academic magazines are used as research tools. This is what sets them apart from trade magazines. While the trade titles typically have serious content, their tone is not quite as serious as that of academic titles.
For this reason, you usually need to be an expert in an academic magazine's field in order to land a writing assignment from an editor. For instance, some writers who start out writing medical stories for general-interest consumer magazines find that they need far deeper knowledge to write stories on the same topics for academic titles. Some writers even go back to school for a master's degree in their chosen field of writing, say, getting a degree in biochemistry so they can land more work writing for academic magazines that doctors read.
A look at the following sample of academic titles will give you an instant understanding of just how precise your knowledge must be to land work as a writer:
The readers who look to these kinds of magazines for information expect deep knowledge and expert insights, and as such the editors who make assignments are looking for writers who can provide more than just nifty nouns and verbs. You of course need to know your subject matter no matter what kind of magazine you work for, but when writing for a scholarly journal, you need to know it as well as the experts in the field itself. The same is true of pieces you may write for technical titles.
