Scientific Literature

The Types of Articles

Thousands of scientific articles are published in

scholarly, peer-reviewed journals every year.

Popular publications like magazines and newspapers also

publish a vast amount of material on scientific topics.

But there is a big difference between a magazine

article and a scholarly one.

And not even all scholarly articles are the same

This presentation will walk you through the basics

of the types of scholarly and popular press articles

and unlock their mysteries.

In scientific research, scholarly journal articles are the

primary way research is communicated and spread.

Because these journals are not widely available outside

academic institutions, you may have never seen a scholarly

article so first we will discuss two basic types.

Type 1:

The Primary

Research Article

The primary research article is the most basic means by

which scientists report the results of their research.

A primary research articles begins when a single researcher

(or more often a group of them) perform an experiment.

When you do an experiment in lab class you are often

assigned a lab report with an Introduction, Materials and

Methods, Results, Discussion, and Conclusions sections.

Research articles are based on this same structure.

Let's take a look at some of the major parts of a

research article

The article starts with some basic information including

the Article's title, author's names and affiliations.

The publication date information shows that this article

passed through a peer review process.

After the publication information you'll see a short

summary of the article called an abstract.

Abstracts are provided so you can quickly see if an

article contains information you are interested in.

The text of the article begins with an introduction which discusses

previous work on the subject and gives a brief overview.

In most articles this will be followed by a methods section.

And then results.

The results section generally contains a number of charts, graphs,

or tables to express the data discussed.

The discussion section may also contain more graphs

as it puts the results into a broader context with

information from other research.

An article's text often ends with acknowledgements and thanks

from the authors for assistance or funding for the research.

And finally the article's bibliography, citing all of the other

research discussed in the article.

This list of references is a valuable place to look for

other articles that you may find useful.

Type 2:

The Review Article

Review articles are also scholarly and subject to peer

review but they differ from primary research in their

content.

Rather than a lab report, a Review article is similar to a

research paper like you have written for school.

Researchers gather together many primary review articles

on a topic and summarize them into a review article.

The review article starts with the same publication details

and abstract that you would find in a research article...

...but unlike a research article the entire text of a review

article is a discussion of the research done of the topic

with new or original research being presented.

These articles allow you to review a lot of primary

research in a short time and identify which of the

research articles you will find valuable.

Because so much material is covered, the list of

references at the end of a review article is

generally much more extensive than that of a

research article, often running several pages.

And to get the most out of a review article you'll

need to be able to follow and read the citations to

each research article in the references section.

Citations come in two basic formats

depending on the article:

parenthetical and numbered.

With a parenthetical citation you look for the author's

name (or occasionally title) in the list of references,

which are generally listed alphabetically.

With a numeric citation you refer to the footnote

number in the references list at the end.

In either case, the result will be a citation to another

article, which you will need to decipher so you can find

the article in question.

Most citations will contain these basic pieces of

information that you would need to locate an article.

Although different journals will have slightly different

formats, the same basic information will still be present

and should be identifiable.

Often a journal name will be abbreviated; you can do a web

search for an abbreviation to get the journal's full title.

With the citation you can use the Journal Finder page on

the Library's Website to find or order the full article.

Popular Press or

Background Articles

In addition to scholarly articles, your project will ask you to

use background articles to gather information.

Popular Press or background articles are those that come

from non-scholarly sources like magazines and newspapers.

These articles are generally written by

journalists rather than scientists.

And they are written to be read by the general public,

rather than students or other researchers

This means that background articles will often describe

the topic in a way that is much easier to understand…

…and contain important basic information that would be

considered too simple to put in a scholarly article.

Just like scholarly articles, your librarian will

show you how to find background articles when

you come to the library lab next week.