Research Guides: Surgical Technology and Sterile Processing: Find Articles using WCC Databases

What is a Scholarly / Peer-Reviewed Article?

Characteristics of scholarly or peer-reviewed articles often:
Characteristics of popular articles often:

Characteristics of scholarly or peer-reviewed articles often:

are written by experts in the subject field. They are authorities in that field of study. Authors are highly educated.
go through a peer-review process. This is the process where the article is read by recognized researchers in the field and recommend the article for publication in the journal. They look for errors in the article/research.
are usually reports on scholarly research or case studies.
cite their sources at the end of the article in the Reference section.
are published monthly, quarterly, bi-annually or annually.
are geared toward scholars, researchers, professionals and college students.

Some examples of scholarly or peer-reviewed journals:

American Journal of Psychology
JAMA: Journal of the American Medical Association
Journal of Physical Therapy Education

Popular Magazine Articles often:

are written by journalists.
are intended to be read by the general public
use language understood by most readers
rarely include citations for their sources
are shorter and general in focus
have a lot of advertising.

Some examples of popular magazines:

Forbes
Popular Science
Time Magazine

How to Read a Peer-Reviewed Article

Source: (2019). How I read a scholarly article. University of Illinois Undergraduate Library https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZS1Beio11M&feature=emb_logo

How to Read a Scholarly (Peer-Reviewed) Article

1. Read the abstract

An abstract is a summary of the article, and will give you an idea of what the article is about and how it will be written. If there are lots of complicated subject-specific words in the abstract, the article will be just as hard to read.

2. Read the conclusion - Many articles do not include a section header for conclusion - Go to discussion

This is where the author will repeat all of their ideas and their findings. Some authors even use this section to compare their study to others. By reading this, you will notice a few things you missed, and will get another overview of the content.

3. Read the first paragraph or the introduction

This is usually where the author will lay out their plan for the article and describe the steps they will take to talk about their topic. By reading this, you will know what parts of the article will be most relevant to your topic!

4. Read the first sentence of every paragraph

These are called topic sentences, and will usually introduce the idea for the paragraph that follows. By reading this, you can make sure that the paragraph has information relevant to your topic before you read the entire thing.

5. The rest of the article

Now that you have gathered the idea of the article through the abstract, conclusion, introduction, and topic sentences, you can read the rest of the article!

To review: Abstract → Conclusion (and Discussion) → Introduction → Topic Sentences → Entire Article