When conducting research, you may rely upon using scholarly articles to gather information for your assignments and papers. Sometimes, your instructor may require you to locate peer-reviewed articles. With these articles, and any others "scholarly" type article, you may find it can be difficult to read and absorb the information within these sources. This guide will provide you with an overview of what "peer-review" means, followed by an easy way to read and absorb their information. Don't be intimidated to read something that could be "above your head", so to speak. Doing so is one way to learn new things and grow as a scholar. Don't be afraid of the "hard" articles; you might be surprised at what you can do!
So what does "Peer Review" mean? To put it simply, "peer-reviewed" is a long process that the article or study has to go through, in order to get published within a journal. The process of peer review usually involves three to four steps and sometimes the articles or studies have to go through these steps multiple times before finally being published in a journal.
The chart pictured to the left is an example of what the peer review process can look like. The process itself is long and arduous, but results in high quality source material for research and studies.
First, writers submit their manuscript to the publishing journal or publishers for consideration.
Next, editors from the journal will send the manuscript to other scholars who work within a similar field as the writer. These scholars must also be qualified to review the manuscript. Most often, editors will send the manuscript to approximately three other scholars for review.
At this point, the editors will evaluate the reviews and decide to either accept or reject the manuscript. Often, the response will be a rejection or acceptance with contingent requirements that the author make revisions to the manuscript before publication. If this happens, the author must make revisions and then resubmit the manuscript for another round of reviews. Sometimes, the manuscript will be accepted at this point, but other times the manuscript may be sent back and then the author will need to resubmit the paper again. This process can occur multiple times, but will ensure that the information in the article or study is of the highest quality possible; since it has been reviewed (sometimes multiple times) by other scholars within the same or similar field of study.
However, because it is a scholarly work and has been reviewed so much, the language and writing can often be difficult to interpret. But don't worry, there is a simple way to read them and interpret the information they provide.
To understand how to read scholarly and peer reviewed articles, you must first understand the purpose of research. The purpose of research is to often find and then create new knowledge; to expand your own knowledge by reading what others have learned and discovered and then presenting to others your findings. Scholarly journals, and peer-reviewed within them are how knowledge is shared with others, even students like yourself.
However, if you are inexperienced with research, you may find it intimidating, especially when you begin to look for resources to support your work. For many it can be hard to read these scholarly articles, whether it is due to the terminology used by the authors or the subject matter. It can be especially "dry and dull" reading, especially when you have multiple articles to go through and very little time to read them. But there is a simple way in which you can absorb the information from these sources, but first you should be aware of how most scholarly articles are structured.
Each scholarly article is usually broken into several parts: the abstract, the introduction, the body, the discussion, the conclusion, and finally the references/ bibliography.
Understanding what kind of information is found in each part can greatly assist in your research and understanding what is best to read and when. So, let's break down each section of the article in order and what kind of information you can find there:
No matter what type of scholarly article you find, most will follow this same type of structure. Understanding this structure can then help you locate the information you need without overloading yourself or burning out during research.
Now that we have covered the parts of a scholarly article, we will now take a look at a simple way to read these types of articles. Below is four simple steps to interpreting the information found within scholarly articles. If you follow these four steps, you will be able to gather the appropriate information that you can then use to support your own research and ideas:
That's all, those are truly the four steps to reading difficult articles. We promise, though it seems unusually simple, that is all you really need to remember!
So, let's break it down...
If you follow these four steps to reading scholarly articles, you'll find it a bit easier to do research. You won't feel as overwhelmed with all the information or feel burnt out after reading a few articles. Remember to take your time, and go slow. Give yourself time to breathe and take breaks. Instructors often give you plenty of time to do research, so space it all out and don't try to do it all at once.
And remember, research is all about learning something new, adding to an "academic conversation", and increasing your own understanding of topics. Research can be rewarding, all you have to do is give yourself time!
Now that you have a method, sometimes you may need to figure out when you need to read certain parts of a scholarly article.
That's right, we are going to give you a kind of cheat sheet to comprehending scholarly reading, so that you can get all of the information you need and still feel like you understood it.
When it comes to scholarly reading, keep these suggestions in mind for the types of readings you may encounter in your classes. These pertain more toward assigned article readings, rather than book readings, but the principle is still the same:
Do all of this and you'll have a much easier time conducting research during your college career. You will be able to comprehend the information and feel confident in your learning and research skills! Just remember to space it out over a few days to a week or so. You don't want to try and read a bunch of scholarly articles and write a paper over the course of a single day.