Please note: this online workshop is NOT available for Think/Achieve credit.

How to Read a Scholarly Article

Watch this short video to learn about identifying characteristics of scholarship, commonly used sections, and strategies for tackling difficult reading.

Peer Review is the process that scholarly journal articles go through prior to publication. It involves the article being reviewed by other scholars within the same field. Peer review is often blind, meaning the author's name is removed and reviewers remain anonymous. 

These are clues to look for that may indicate the article is scholarly and peer-reviewed:

Article Title: Long and descriptive

Author(s): what are the author's credentials? Most scholarly sources have authors who have significant credentials and are affiliated with a university or research center.

Article length: Scholarly articles are about 5 pages at minimum, and can be up to 25-30 pages

Section:  Most scholarly articles are broken down into sections. Common sections are the abstract, introduction, methods, results, and discussion.

References: Scholarly peer reviewed sources should contain a reference list at the end of the article.

To be sure an article has been peer reviewed, you can look up the Journal and look at it's submission process.

Many journal articles contain these sections:

Abstract: Concise summary of the research; including purpose, results, and implication statements.

Introduction & Literature Review: Describes problem, importance of research, and previous research on the topic. This portion of the paper will have the most in-text citations pointing to other literature on the topic. 

Methods: Description of the procedures and methodologies used to carry out the research.

Results: Data collected as a result of research. Results are typically given in statistics and in the form of tables, charts and graphs.

Discussion and Conclusion: Summary of results; implications and directions for future research.

References: All of the works cited in the paper. 

You don't have to read the entire article in order!

Suggested steps:

1. Look at basics: read the article title; note authors and journal title; skim the article to note subheadings
2. Read Abstract: if the abstract fits within the scope of your research, continue
3. Jump down to the Discussions & Conclusions and read. This is the essential part of the article and will tell you what the researchers learned. At this point, you will have a good understanding of the purpose and major findings of the article.
4. Read the other sections.
5. Don't forget to review the references. You may see other titles that would help your research.

Practice reading scholarly articles from different disciplines: