Using subject databases helps you weed out articles that don't really relate to your topic.

Reading scholarly articles can be a bit daunting.  But once you understand the parts of the article, this process becomes easier.  Scholarly articles (including scientific research articles) use language that can be hard to understand.  Remember these articles are written by experts for other experts, so the language is standard for what is used in the discipline being written about.  Scientific articles usually include the following parts:  introduction, literature review, methods, results, discussion, and conclusion. Read more about each of these sections below or look at this Anatomy of a Scholary Article.

There are two parts to creating successful citations - 1) deciding what information to reference, and 2) recording the citation in an acceptable format.

1)To avoid plagiarizing and successfully include the best information from what you read, check out these tips:

How to Avoid Plagiarism

How to Quote and Paraphrase a Source

2)To refresh yourself on the basic information needed to create citations, review either of these tutorial:

Citations 101

The Basics of APA Style

To see multiple examples of how to successfully cite the articles, books or lectures that you refer to in your paper in APA format, use the following resource:

APA Guidelines from the Online Writing Lab at Purdue