On this page are some resources for you to review and learn more about what scholarly articles are and how to work with them. The first video and the infographic discuss what scholarly articles are, how to identify them, and why you might want to use them. These resources review what was covered in class, and add a bit more information.
Further down the page, there is a second video and a link to an interactive tutorial introducing the parts of a scholarly article and how to read one. This additional information may be helpful if you are already encountering assignments that ask you to work with scholarly articles.
Your instructor has asked you to find scholarly articles for your research paper, now what? In this video, we're going to examine three elements to evaluate whether a source is suitable for our purpose of writing a research paper. Every piece of communication has an author, a target audience, and a purpose to the information they're trying to communicate. When we look at that in the context of a scholarly journal article, we can see that as a group, these journals have a fairly serious tone. The covers are informative and not flashy. Let's look inside a scholarly journal at one of the articles. Here is one scholarly article. As we can see this article is 15 pages long. When we look at the author's they tend to be experts, researchers, and scholars in their field. We see here, the authors are affiliated with universities. The authors are writing for an audience of other researchers, scholars and students in that field. These journals are often publishing valuable information for their target audience such as original research studies. Their purpose is to educate and inform. Therefore, these articles are typically longer than five pages since the studies produce a lot of data to fully explain their methods, findings, and conclusions. Because they are writing with a specific audience in mind, they use the specialized vocabulary of that subject field. So if you're a newcomer to this field, you may find it challenging to read and if there are graphics or images included in them, it's because they contribute to understanding the content of the article. They also always include a reference list or bibliography that shows where they got their information from. Now, let's examine author, audience, and purpose in popular sources. These publications have a very different focus than the scholarly ones. We can immediately see the covers are designed to be eye-catching and appealing. When we look at an article in a magazine, we see the authors may be writers with an interest in the topic, but not necessarily experts on that topic. These writers are in the business of selling magazines. Therefore, they seek the widest audience possible, with entertainment and advertising being a purpose of these publications. They want to grab and keep their readers' attention. So the reader will continue to read the publication and hopefully purchase it or some of the advertised products. The purpose of these articles is generally to inform but also entertain. Therefore, the articles are short and engaging often including catchy images and titles. They don't bog down the reader with things like references. They are not going to include original research studies. But they may say things like researchers have found or a recent study. Then summarize the findings in an easy to digest takeaway. As a result you're not going to see a lot of scientific language in these articles because they are gearing the writing toward a non-specialized audience. It's not that this article is bad per se, but it doesn't fit our purpose or our target audience when writing a research paper. Popular articles that reference original research studies may be used as stepping stones to the scholarly articles which contain the research studies. You can use the information found in the popular article, like researchers name, to locate the original source. So just to wrap up, you can use this approach to evaluate any source you come across to determine whether or not it meets your academic research needs. If you would like more information on how to effectively search, check out our other videos or ask a librarian for help.
Consider the... | Scholarly Publications are... | Popular Publications are... |
---|---|---|
Length of Articles |
Lengthy, often more than 10 pages, and include areas such as abstracts, methods, results, and discussions. |
Short, fewer than 10 pages, and lack structural subsections. |
Audience | Written for academics or professionals with advanced language. | Written for the general public in non-specialized language. |
Authority & Expertise | Written by academics, specialists, or researchers in the field. | Written by journalists or professional writers. |
Bibliography | Well researched and includes information about their sources in an area called References, Works Cited, or Footnotes so a reader can consult the material that the author used. | sometimes researched, but sources are seldom included with the article. A good editor will check the writer's sources. |
Frequency | published monthly, quarterly, or yearly. | published daily, weekly, or monthly. |
Inclusions | not decorated with images and only have specialized advertising if any is included. They will also include reviews of the literature, charts, data, and tables along with descriptions of how their research was conducted. | full of decorative photographs, illustrations, and text. They also include a lot of product advertisements. |
Subjects | Confined to a single, specific aspect of a subject area such as music theory, European political science, film studies, language development, or stem cell research. | Often inclusive of many subjects, such as in Time, People, Newsweek, or focused on a single subject with the intention of entertaining such as in Wired or Sports Illustrated. |
Vocabulary | written with technical or specialized vocabulary unique to a subject area. | written in conventional or conversational language, appropriate for most readers |
Publication Process | sent to experts in the subject who review the article to evaluate credibility and accuracy before being published. This process is known as "peer-review". | sent to an editor who may know nothing of the topic. The editor might use a fact-checker, who also may not be familiar with the topic, to verify some information. |