Most people engaged in academic research differentiate among categories of periodicals -- academic journal, popular magazine, news magazine, etc.

Lots of academic libraries have prepared guides intended to help a reader "classify" any particular periodical. For example, here are guides from Cornell and Purdue.

It is possible to "rate" journals by the number of times they are referred to in other sources:

• "high-impact" political science journals
• "high-impact" law journals
• "high-impact" economics journals
• "high-impact" sociology journals
• "high-impact" anthropology journals

 If you need to determine whether or not a given periodical (journal or magazine) is a "scholarly" or "academic" resource, you can search for information on that periodical in the Ulrichsweb directory.

Here, Content Type may be described as "Academic / Scholarly" and the status of the journal as "Refereed" (or peer-reviewed) may be indicated by this charming icon:
 

A journal's policies on article submissions and publication usually are available in each issue -- as in this example -- but this information may be hard to find when you use an article in online form.