Scholarly journal articles in the social sciences typically follow a standardized format. This chart outlines that format and provides questions to guide your reading of scholarly articles. For a more thorough introduction to reading strategies for scholarly articles, try this tutorial from the Hunter College library.
| Section |
What to Look for |
| Introduction |
- What is the main question or topic this article addresses?
- Is this going to be relevant to your project?
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Literature Review
This is a survey of what other researchers have written about the topic. It is sometimes combined with the introduction.
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- What are the major themes the author has identified in the literature as being pertinent to their topic?
- Are there any sources cited here that could be useful for your research?
- How does the author see their research question fitting in to the rest of this literature?
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Methods
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- What is the researcher's method of answering the research question? (e.g., qualitative, quantitative)
- What are the variables being measured/analyzed?
- Where is the data coming from?
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| Results |
- Based on their analysis of the data, what answers to their research questions did the authors find?
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Discussion
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- What are the key takeaways from this study?
- How do the results of this study fit in with the results of other studies on this topic?
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| Conclusion |
- What is the main contribution this study makes to the literature on this topic (you can also look to the introduction for this)?
- What are some questions left unanswered?
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| Bibliography |
- What other sources that this article cites could be useful to you?
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