Reading Scholarly Sources

Overview

You might be wondering why there’s a whole chapter just about reading scholarly articles. Isn’t it just reading but with more technical vocabulary? Or maybe you’ve tried reading one before and found it confusing, and now you’re skeptical that this chapter can actually help. The good news is that scholarly articles often follow a predictable structure. Once you get familiar with that organizational pattern, you’ll be able to read more efficiently and understand more of what you’re reading.

Purpose and Audience of a Scholarly Source

Before you begin reading a scholarly source, take a moment to think about the author’s purpose and intended audience. We covered purpose and audience for all sources in the “Information Purpose” chapter. While scholarly sources usually aim to share new research and contribute to an ongoing scholarly conversation, a closer look at your specific source might reveal a more focused purpose that can help you understand it better.

Keep in mind that the primary audience of scholarly sources is typically other scholars, researchers, and experts, not college students. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t read scholarly articles! It just means you might need to work a little harder to follow along. These articles often assume the reader already has a strong background in the subject, is comfortable with technical or dense language, and doesn’t need to be enticed or hooked into the topic. Knowing this upfront can help you adjust your expectations and get the most out of each of the sections outlined below.

Parts of a Scholarly Article

Many research articles, especially in the sciences and social sciences, follow a structure known as “IMRAD.” Articles in the humanities often follow a similar structure, but you will also see some variation from it. IMRAD stands for:

• Introduction
• Methods
• Results, and
• Discussion

They might not always label these sections the same way, but the content usually follows this order. That said, you shouldn’t always read them in this order. Skipping around to targeted sections can save time and help you get more out of the article. The next sections follow the approach that we recommend taking for most scholarly articles. Before diving in, ask yourself:

• Why am I reading this?
• What do I hope to learn from it?
• How does it connect to my research question?

Your answers will help you decide which sections are most important to focus on and might change the order in which you want to read them.

Title

You’ve already learned how to evaluate a title in the “Evaluating and Refining Your Search Strategy” chapter. Now that you’ve chosen to read the article, take another look at the title. Titles often use a format where the part before the colon grabs attention and the part after the colon describes the study. Look up any unfamiliar terms—they’ll likely show up again in the article.

Question This Section Helps Answer:

• What is this article about?

Abstract

The abstract is a summary of the author’s research findings and tells what to expect when you read the full article. The “Evaluating and Refining Your Search Strategy” chapter also covered reading the abstract. Since it is so important, let’s reread this paragraph from that chapter:

If you haven’t already done those steps, do them now.

Questions This Section Helps Answer:

• What is this article about?
• What topic is the author studying?
• What are the main findings?

Section Headings

A section heading serves as a title for a particular part of an article. Take a quick scan of all the section headings before reading in depth. This gives you a feel for the article’s structure and helps you anticipate what’s coming. Understanding the terms in these headings will also help you follow the author’s main argument.

Discussion and Conclusion

After the abstract and section headings, jump to the “Discussion” and “Conclusion” sections (even though they come at the end of the article). The “Discussion” section is sometimes also called “Analysis.”

When writing papers, you’ve likely heard the cliché “In the introduction, write what you will say, then say it, then write what you just said.” With this formula, it would seem logical to gloss over the conclusion, because, essentially, you’ve read it already. However, this is not the case. Instead, pay close attention to the conclusion. It can help you make sure you understand the introduction.

Sometimes a slight re-phrasing can help you understand the author’s arguments in an important, new way. In addition, the conclusion is often where authors indicate the limitations of their work, the unanswered questions, and the horizons left unexplored. And this is often the land of exam and essay questions . . . asking you to extend the author’s analysis beyond its own shores.

Questions This Section Helps Answer:

• What were the author’s overall findings?
• Why are these findings important?
• What limitations of the study do the author(s) identify (if any)?
• What suggestions for future research do the authors make (if any)?

Introduction

The introduction is more detailed than the abstract. It shows how the study fits into existing research and what the author hopes to add to the conversation. The literature review, where the author(s) cover all the research that has come before, might be part of this section or its own separate section.

If the author is doing their job well, the introduction will not only summarize the whole piece, present the main idea, and tell us why we should care, but it will also often offer a road map for the rest of the article. Sometimes, the introduction will be called “introduction,” which makes things easy. Sometimes, it’s not. Generally, treat the first section of an article as the introduction, regardless of whether it’s explicitly called that or not.

Roadmaps included in the introduction are often surprisingly straightforward. They often are as simple as “in the first section, we examine . . . in the second section we argue . . .” etc. Search for these maps. Underline them. Highlight them. Go back to them when you find your comprehension slipping.

Questions the Introduction Section Helps Answer:

• What is this article about?
• What is the author planning to do in the paper?
• Why should we care about this problem/study?
• What question or hypothesis is being tested?
• How does the author intend to contribute to the field?

Questions the Literature Review Section Helps Answer:

• What do we already know about this topic and what is left to discover?
• What are key past findings on this topic?
• How do past studies lead into this study?
• What are the research hypotheses?

Methods

This section explains how the research was conducted. It includes who participated, what they were asked to do, and how the data was collected and analyzed. In social science and science articles, you may see subsections like “Materials” or “Procedure.”

Questions This Section Helps Answer:

• What data did the author use, and how was it analyzed?
• Who were the participants in this sample?
• Is the sample a good representation of the entire population? If not, how are they different?
• Is the study qualitative (based on interviews, ethnography, participant observation, or content analysis), quantitative (based on statistical analysis), or multi-method (includes both qualitative and quantitative analysis)?

Results

The “Results” section (sometimes also called “Data”) can be heavy on statistics and charts. If you’re not planning to replicate or deeply analyze the study’s methods, it’s okay to skim this section. The main findings are usually explained in the “Discussion” section. Bottom line: you can likely move quickly through the data, unless you are a numbers person who enjoys it.

Question This Section Helps Answer:

• What did the author find?

Works Cited

Also called “References” or “Bibliography.” This section lists all the sources used in the article. Always be sure to scroll through them. Good research usually cites many different kinds of sources (books, journal articles, etc.). Train yourself to notice the differences between source types in your field’s citation style. As you read the Works Cited page, be sure to look for sources that might help you to answer your own research question. It’s considered best practice—and a real time-saver—to do so. If you find a cited source you would like to read yourself, review the “Using Search@UW to Find a Specific Article” section of the “Search@UW as a Tool” chapter to learn how to track it down.

Questions This Section Helps Answer:

• What do we already know about this topic?
• Who are other key researchers studying this topic?
• How does this article join the scholarly conversation?

Other Tips

This IMRAD structure is common in science and social science articles. Research articles in the humanities, like history or literature, often have some of the same sections, but they might not name them outright. Use the content itself to figure out which section you’re reading. For more help with reading articles in the humanities, check out the “How to Read a Secondary Source” and “‘Predatory’ Reading” chapters from Reading, Writing, and Researching for History. Although these guides were written for students of history, the tips apply to other humanities fields as well.

The above reading strategy makes a good general plan, but sometimes you have a more specific purpose for your source. Are you reading it for a class discussion? Planning to use it in a term paper (if so, how much of it will be useful)? Do you need to write a critique or review? Maybe you’re interested in the author’s theoretical perspective, their findings, methods, or the data they used. Or maybe you just want an overview of what’s been researched on a certain topic. Whatever the case, knowing your purpose will help you decide how to read and which parts to focus on.

Attributions

This chapter contains material adapted from:

• Reading Games: Strategies for Reading Scholarly Sources by Karen Rosenberg, in Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Volume 2, used under a CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0 license
• Anatomy of a Scholarly Article by Wendy Hayden and Stephanie Margolin, in Research Toolkit, used under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license
• How to Read (and Understand) a Social Science Journal Article by Frederique Laubepin, for Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, used under a CC-BY license