Academic articles are sometimes called "scholarly" or "peer-reviewed" or "refereed". This means they've been written by people with credentials and other expertise in the particular field, and reviewed by other experts in the field for methodology, accuracy, etc. They are written for people who are familiar with that field, using technical language, and usually include few illustrations or other images, though graphs and tables are common.
They differ from "popular" magazine or news articles that are written by journalists or free-lance writers for the general public. These are usually written at an introductory level, are only checked by editors, and often have lots of illustrations.
Many library databases allow you to limit your search results to academic/scholarly/peer-reviewed articles only, or to trade publications or magazines.
These databases are listed to provide you starting points to begin looking for your research paper and class discussion sources. Databases at the top are more focused on mathematical sciences, while those toward the bottom are interdisciplinary but still helpful.
The below journals are recommended math journals for math seminar students due to their articles being easily readable.
