Find over 5,000 scholarly peer-reviewed journals, magazines, reports, multimedia sources and more on life, earth, agricultural, and environmental sciences. Full-text articles included.
This guide walks users through scholarly articles, from what they are to how to find, read, evaluate, and summarize them.
Top five tips for understanding a scholarly article:
Look at the subject terms/headings "tagged" on each article to identify the main ideas of the article before you even read it!
Read the Abstract or Summary first to ensure relevance.
Jump around the article- Abstract, Methods, Results, Discussion... you won't spoil the ending! If these sections are helpful to you, then read it more closely start to finish. (See video below for more on this reading strategy.)
Take notes and look up words you don't know.
After reading the article and reviewing your notes, write down a 200-ish word summary in your own words- don't use quotations from the article! Ask yourself: What did they study? How did they study it? What did they find?
Bonus tip:
Use the references or works cited to find other sources related to your topic!
