How to Read Scholarly Articles

How to Read Scholarly Articles

Scholarly articles can be read in different ways depending on your goals, but the first step is knowing how they’re put together. By learning the key parts of a journal article, you’ll be better prepared to read critically and find the information you need.

Journal Article Elements

Below are elements typically found within scholarly journal articles. While not every article will contain every single element, most will have many of the pieces explained below.

Journal Information

• Things like journal title, volume, issue, and page numbers, and year of publication. 
• Why is this important?
  • Journal reputation can help you identify whether it is a source you can trust.
  • Volume, issue and page numbers can help you find the resource again
  • Year of publication lets you know about how current the information may be (this may be more or less important depending on your topic)

Article Title

• Gives you a very brief idea of what the resource is about

Authors

• Who wrote the resource

Author Affiliations

• Where the authors work or study, perhaps what field or discipline their degrees are in
• Help you better understand author expertise or qualifications 

Abstract

• Formal summary of the article
• Should include their thesis (or big "so what") from the article, the big take-away or goals, as well as brief bits of what they did that led them to their conclusions

Keywords

• Sometimes authors or articles will include keywords or supplied vocabulary, drawing out the most important themes and listing them with the abstract

Introduction

• Formally introduces the article 
• May contain content similar to the abstract

Literature Review

• Outlines past research on the topic
• Brings together lots of other resources (journal articles, books, etc.) to share what has already been said
• At the end of the lit review, the authors may also note gaps in the literature, usually stating that this reinforces the need for their research, which you'll read about in upcoming sections of the article

Methods

• Describe what the researchers are doing to answer their research question
• Depending on the type of research this may mean what they used to measure something or what interventions they used; it may mean describing an experiment or it could be trying a new approach to a lesson plan. It all depends on the article and the topic

Results

• Describe what happened when the researchers or authors tried their new intervention or approach
• Sometimes there may be charts and graphs showing impact of interventions, equations, etc.

Conclusions or Discussion

• Where they discuss implications of their findings - why is this important, new, relevant
• Where they think about future research - usually articles will say future research or experiments are needed to either reinforce their findings or test out new interventions or examine more factors

References

• List of resources used throughout the article
• This can be helpful if you need to find more resources on this same topic - you can track back those listed to find more information