Reading a scholarly journal article does not need to be daunting. Here are some suggestions:

• Read the abstract first. This should give you a complete overview of the article.
• Skim the article to get a sense of the sections and general contents.
• Read the abstract/introduction and then skip to the conclusion or discussion section. This will help you get an overall sense of the article and whether or not it is relevant to your research.
• Then read each section carefully.

A scholarly or research article is an article that presents the findings of a study, research or experimentation. This type of article is written by experts in a discipline for other experts in the discipline. Scholarly articles are considered more reliable than most other sources because the results are based on research not conjecture or opinion.

When you are doing research, you will probably want to use scholarly journal articles. It will depend a little on the assignment but in many situations, you will need to find research (or scholarly) articles. So it is important that you can identify a scholarly journal. The video below is about identifying a scholarly journal article.

Created by Amanda Dinscore