All About Scholarly Articles & Peer Review

Scholarly Articles

Scholarly articles are written by experts in a particular field of study. Their purpose is to share research with other experts or scholars. They are generally longer than "popular" articles and use field specific language/jargon. You will always find citations at the end of a scholarly article.

Scholarly articles share these characteristics:

• Authors are experts in the field.  Authors’ names are clearly listed with credentials/degrees and affiliations which are often universities or research institutions.
• Audience is other experts (scholars) and students in the field. The study is in-depth and the language is specialized.
• Bibliography or Works Cited page is the list of sources used by the authors to build their discussion. Scholarly articles include footnotes, endnotes or parenthetical in-text notes which refer to the titles in this list of sources.

Scholarly Conversation

Scholars publish in academic journals to share their research with other scholars or experts in their field of study. You can think of scholarship as a conversation where ideas are created, debated, and weighed against one another over time. Information users and creators come together to discuss meaning, with the effective researcher adding his or her voice to the conversation. As students you are also engaging in the scholarly conversation when you write research papers for your classes!

Research 101: Scholarship is a Conversation Links to an external site.
Structure

You can generally expect to find, especially if it is a scholarly RESEARCH article, most or all of the following sections:

abstract - summarizes the article intro/literature review - reviews related literature in the field methodology -  explains how the experiment was conducted results - details what happened and provides raw data sets (often as tables or graphs) discussion - interprets the results conclusions - connects the results with theories and other research references - lists previous research or theories that influenced the research

INTERACTIVE! Click to learn more about the Anatomy of a Scholarly Article Links to an external site.

Peer Review

Scholarly articles go through a rigorous vetting process called peer review. The process often includes revisions to the original manuscript by peers in the author's discipline before publication in a scholarly journal. Scholarly articles can take months or year(s) to be written and published. You can think of peer review as a quality control system. Peer reviewers ensure that an article meets a high standard of scholarship.

Peer Review in 3 Minutes Links to an external site.

 

When searching library resources Links to an external site., you can limit your results to peer-reviewed articles.