Peer reviewed articles can be a challenge to read!  Remember, it’s a conversation between scholars and researchers, so it will include a lot of jargon, or experty words that everyday people don’t often use.  That’s okay because you can always look up any words you don’t know.

Anatomy of a Peer Reviewed Article

The good news is, peer reviewed articles all follow the same basic template.

• Title and Author – typically, they will have more than one author and give you some basic information about each author.
• Abstract – a summary of what the article is about to help you decide quickly if it is relevant to your research.
• Introduction – describes the topic or problem, the goal of the research, and why it is important.
• Article text – may include a literature review, experiment, or study.
• Charts and graphs – and other information relating to the research.
• Conclusion – or summary of the results of the research and the impact of those results.
• References – or a list of sources the authors used to publish their research.  Use this list to find additional sources on your topic.

This page, from North Carolina State University, allows you to click through the different parts of a peer reviewed article and tells you what is included in each section. 

How to Read a Peer Reviewed Article

When we read a novel or book for fun, we read linearly, meaning we start at the beginning and read through to the end.  Reading a peer reviewed article is different.

Read Strategically, not Linearly.

• Mine the text for pertinent information, look for particular sections that contain vital information, read the whole article but only read those pertinent sections in real depth.
• Read the Abstract, which will tell you a lot about the content of the article and whether it is actually relevant to your research.
• Check out the citations, especially in the Introduction section.
• Read the conclusion and discussion sections.
• Look for charts and graphs, and read around these sections.
• Finally, check out the bibliography for more sources that may be pertinent to your research.

This video is about the anatomy of a scholarly article. Once you know the typical framework for these articles, you can quickly scan and decide whether an article will support your research.