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Scholarly Articles

This guide describes what scholarly articles are and provides advice on finding, reading, and evaluating them.

You'll likely need to read scholarly articles a couple of times- this is normal! Here's one strategy:

  1. Read the abstract to ensure usefulness and get a "road map" of what you'll read more in depth. A good abstract should contain "spoilers" or the main findings of an article.
  2. Read the methods, skim the results, read the discussion. If this is still an article that can be useful to you, then...
  3. Read the entire article from start to finish.

Take notes and look up unfamiliar words as you read.

Reading these types of articles takes practice. Be patient with yourself and ask an instructor, mentor, fellow classmate, or librarian for help if you get stuck.

Reading demo

Watch Librarian Jamie use this strategy in the following video. (Use the "toggle" option- two arrows- in the upper right corner of the video to expand the view of the article instead of the librarian!)

License information

This module is licensed under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 4.0