Welcome to this tutorial on how to read a peer-reviewed article. Today I'm going to show you some strategies and tips on how to tackle peer-reviewed articles- so let's get started. Peer-reviewed articles are the standard in college research many professors require you to use them what makes this article so special editing and review process. Peer-reviewed articles often represent the best research possible on your topic. Sometimes it appears that articles conflict on the same topic that's alright. Scholarship is conversation and sometimes different scholars and researchers might have differing views and opinions on the same topic... when that happens it's exciting. In the sciences including the social sciences peer-reviewed articles are set up the same way. Each article is broken down into sections abstract, introduction, methods and methodology, results, discussion, conclusion, references. Let's take a look at an article. The abstract section which is the first section here in the italicized font gives you a brief summary with article is aboutread this section first to help you decide if the article is useful to you or not. The introduction tells you why and what the researchers did- just like in your research paper the introduction sets up the purpose of the paper. The methods or methodology and in this case materials and methods section is next. This tells us how the researchers gathered their data where they got the materials and how they conducted experiments. Next is the result section this is where they tell you what happened. Did the data show the results they were looking for? Was the experiment a success? You'll find lots of tables and charts in the result section. Then there's a discussion section sometimes this section gets combined with the results section the purpose at the discussion is to tell you what the implications of the research are. The conclusion is next this short section, often unlabeled is only one two paragraphs long. This section should remind you what was done why it was done and how it was done.

A good conclusion should reflect the introduction. Finally the reference section ends the article. This is a list of all the articles the researchers read and used before they wrote the article your reading. This section is useful to you because you can find more articles on the same topic skim this section for anything that catches your eye. Peer-reviewed articles are difficult to read and often filled with words and terms are not familiar with students need to read peer-reviewed articles several times before they can make sense. Here are some tips to make your job easier. The first time you read the article mark all the words you don't know then open up a word document and using your favorite online dictionary copy paste the definitions onto the document. After a few hours pick up the article again and read it this time check your glossary. As you're reading highlight all the main ideas the article should start to make sense now. Put the article down for at least 24 hours the next time you read it look for details and information you can use your paper. The article should make sense nowif the article still confuses you read it again. This concludes this tutorial on how to read a peer-reviewed article if you have any questions ask a CMC librarian They're happy to help.