How to Read an Academic Journal Article?

Here’s how to read and understand an Academic Journal article so that you can derive the maximum benefit from your reading.

What is an Academic Journal article?

Academic journals are periodicals in which researchers publish their work. They are usually peer-reviewed journals, meaning that the work is reviewed and evaluated by other scholars before publication, to ensure only the best-researched articles are published.

Journal articles provide insights into the workings of a discipline. They demonstrate how researchers formulate hypotheses, design empirical studies, analyze the observations they collect, and interpret their results.

Journal articles can appear daunting and often make for dense, dry reading, but they generally follow a standardized format. Once you understand the structure of each article, knowing where to look for important information and understanding the content becomes much easier.

Main Parts of a Journal Article

A journal article inlcudes several inter-related parts; together, they tell the complete story about a piece of research.

Title: The title is a concise statement about the theoretical issues investigated. Basically, it tells you what is this article about.

Abstract: Short paragraph that provides a summary of the article. It tells you what is this article about, what topic the author is investigating, what was her primary finding.

Introduction: This section introduces the topic of the article and discusses what the article contributes to existing knowledge on the topic. What is this article about? What does the author plan to do in the paper? Why should we care about this problem/study? What is the author trying to test or show? How does she intend to contribute to the field?

Literature Review (this can be part of the introduction or can be a separate section): Discuss previous work on the topic, point out what questions remain, and relate the current research to the existing literature. There should also be a clear discussion of the author’s research hypotheses.

What do we already know about this topic and what is left to discover? What are some of the most important past findings on this topic? How have these past studies led the author to do this particular study? What are the research hypotheses?

Methods and data: This section provides information about the individuals that were studied, how the analysis was conducted, includes information about the participants, the procedures, the instruments and the variables that were measured.

What data did the author use and how did she analyze them? Who were the participants in this sample? Why were they chosen? Is the sample a good representation of the entire population? If not, how are they different? Is the study qualitative (based on interviews, ethnography, participant observation, or content analysis), quantitative (based on statistical analysis), or multi-method (includes both qualitative and quantitative analysis)?

Results: What did the author find by analyzing the data. This section can get technical, reporting the results in detailed statistical language. Tables and figures are frequently included.

Discussion & conclusion: This final section discusses in “plain English” what the results mean and how the study contributes to existing knowledge. Here the research questions are answered and it should be clear at this point whether the hypotheses were supported. This section relates the research back to the larger context, and suggests avenues for future research.

What are the overall findings? Why are they important? What are the limitations? What are the suggestions for future research?

References: Lists all of the articles and other sources that were cited within the article.

When it comes to reading journal articles, you really don’t have to read it sequentially from the start to the end, like the way you do a novel; this is often not the most efficient approach. Depending on your goal, you may need to cut through peripheral details, ignore sophisticated statistics with which you may not be familiar, and focus on the central ideas.

Best Way to Read an Article?

What do you want from it?

Before you even start reading, think what are you trying to achieve from reading the article. What exactly is your purpose?

Is this an assignment for class discussion, do you need to write a critical review, is it an article you want to use in a term paper, do you want to know the author’s theoretical perspective, methods, data, findings, etc?

Based on this, you should determine your reading strategy.

Come up with a reading strategy

Now that you know the main parts of a journal article – Title, Abstract, Introduction, Literature Review, Methods and Data, Results, Discussion and Conclusion, References, determine how you want to approach the various parts.

Determine what you want to focus upon – big picture, more detail, nitty-gritty, main points, evidence, theory, data/analysis, graphs/tables, implications, limitations, publications on this topic, what is known about the topic, and so on.

Structural reading vs close reading

In structural reading, you try to understand what the book offers, based on its title, introduction, table of contents (Paul and Elder 2008). This will give you an idea as to how closely you want to go into the matter. When reading structurally, skim through the abstract, introduction and conclusions. Try to find out what is the main idea in the article, what are the main sections, what are the various parts, which sections you may want to pursue during close reading.

Close reading is where you read every paragraph to understand what is being said, reflect on the arguments being made, and evaluate the quality of the evidence being presented. Because this approach requires active engagement with the text, you will need to make notes, comments or observations, highlight important passages/quotes, and so on. This way you are more likely to retain the information that is provided.

Closing Thoughts

In most cases, it’s okay to skim through the material and move on; there are very few articles in any field that requires you to read every word carefully. So devise your reading strategy accordingly.

Sources

Paul, R. and Elder, L. 2008. How to Read a Paragraph: The Art of Close Reading. Dillon Beach, CA: The Foundation for Critical Thinking Press.

Weir, R. 2011. Its Not Harry Potter” Inside Higher Ed http://www.insidehighered.com/advice/instant_mentor/essay_on_teaching_students_to_read journal_articles#ix zz2W75q1Gqg Accessed 6/13/2013.