When you flip through an academic journal you'll find all sorts of articles; and not just articles on different topics, but different types of articles. This article is a comment article, as you can see in the upper, right-hand corner. Which, basically, means it's a viewpoint or commentary article; so it's more likely a hold opinion than a research article is, but one thing and take note on comment articles - they're going to be shorter than regular articles and one is on the changing face of global child demographics.If we scroll down, this is about two pages long it has some illustrations, some graphs for us; but when I get to the top of the third page it ends; but it still - even though this is an opinion piece or more of a commentary piece - it still gives us a bibliography. The other thing that it gives us is information on the authors, and where they're associated with, how to contact them, and also they have declared that they have no conflicts of interests. So, this means if they were writing an opinion piece of a certain drug, they're not profiting off of that drug - that's why they declare that they have no conflict of interest. So, the thing I really want you to take note of here: even in commentary/opinion piece, you're going to find a bibliography. Because even though the giving their opinion on something, they're backing it up with credible information. This is another article from an academic journal. In fact, this is from the Journal of the American Medical Association, which is also known as JAMA. Again this is a viewpoint article - which it tells us at the top. We've got the title of it, they're talking about about distracted driving. And we've got the authors' names. We've also got the authors' credentials; so we've got somebody with an M.D. and somebody with both an M.D. and a Ph.D. Now, I'm going to scroll down a bit. I've got author affiliation; so it looks like Coben is with the Injury Control Research Center in West Virginia University and both Coben and Zhu are with West Virginia University, Morgantown.

There's information on how to contact them. And, again it continues to remind us that it's a viewpoint article. Even though it's a viewpoint article they talk about conflict of interest and any disclosures they need to make. So, we know if they are, in any way, going to profit or receive some kind of benefit from what they're telling us. And, again, we've got a bibliography for more reading. So, again, they are backing up what they're saying a viewpoint article with actual credible information. This article, again, is from the Journal of the American Medical Association, or JAMA. So it's a good academic journal. And, again, at the top of the page they actually tell us what type of article of it is. So, this is a letter. What that generally means is it's a letter to the editor on some of topic or some article that's been published in JAMA previous to this issue. Here we've got the article that was previously published, and then a letter to the editor of about that previously published article. And, usually, they're not saying, "Way to go!" Usually they are saying there is something wrong with this article, we need to discuss it further. So, the other thing that I want to show you about a letter to the editor - it's obviously going to be short - but it gives an opinion, but if we go to the bottom of it: again, we get author information , author affiliation, conflict of interest disclosures, and then, lastly, when I scroll up to the top of the page I get a reference list or a bibliography. So even though this is even more opinion than commentary might be, we are getting credible information that backs up her opinion. This article is what we would more think of as a traditional academic journal article meaning that it's a research article based off of somebody's experiments and it's reporting the findings. So they wrote up and published their findings for the field or discipline. There are several things we need to look at.

First of all, you're going to base your first look through to see if it's an article for you on the title of the article. But then you want go ahead and read the abstract, because it's a summary of the actual article. Read that paragraph and see further whether it's the article you want or not. Academic articles, especially research articles, should be treated somewhat like academic books - in that you don't just pick it up and read it from beginning to end, or at least very few people read articles like that. Rather, they take the title and the abstract first to determine whether they want to read it. Maybe look at the introduction, and it may be a possibility after the introduction that they've decided, "No, I don't want to read this after all." But, then, if they go on to read the rest of the article, chances are they'll skip from the introduction down to the conclusion, then go back to the methodology, then read through the data and findings, and then maybe check out the bibliography. So, you may be skipping around in an academic journal article to find what you want first. It may not make sense to read from beginning to end. Here's some things to look at: first we got our authors, and where they are associated with. So they are all associated with universities. We could Google their name plus the university, find out their credentials, find out if they're working in a department that it makes sense that they're actually publishing an article on the effect of Twitter on college student engagement and grades. So that might be a psychology department, it might be a sociology department. This is a 14-page article, so it's not going to be a quick article to read. They've got the role of a funding source, so that gives you some more information. Let's say we're talking, again, about a drug and the funding source was Pfizer, a large drug company. Obviously there might be some bias involved there, and that's why they're going to give you the funding source - so where they got the money to do this research.

And determine whether about source was biased are not. And, then, we've got the bibliography. The other thing that we want to a look at is the citation information that you'll need, if you're going to cite this article. So, the first thing: we've got title of the article, we've got the authors of the article, we've got a DOI . Really what need are the journal title , the date of publication , the volume number , and in the pages that this article appeared on in that issue . Now the piece of information that it doesn't give us as an issue number. Sometimes journal articles don't give that to you, so we don't have it to give in our citation.