WEEK 7 Exercise Reading Scholarly Articles

Worksheet for Reading a Scholarly Article Exercise

INSTRUCTIONS: Use the article you have chosen for your Discipline Project to respond to each item listed below. Enter your answer on this worksheet. Include a link to the article.

1.Title of article:

2.Title of journal:

3.Title and credibility of the publisher: (typically, credible journals are published by universities or major academic publishers. Be wary of those that are not).

4.Title of the university database where you found the article:

5.Author(s), their credentials, and university affiliations. If not listed in the article, research the author(s).

6.Date of publication (must have been published within the last two years in a peer-reviewed journal):

7.Does the article have an abstract? (Yes/No) If it does, copy and paste the abstract in the space below:

8.Who do you think is the specific target audience for this article? (Yes, it’s scholars and professionals, but scholars and professionals with what specific interest and/or field of study?) What clues does the article provide about this target audience?

9.What type of documentation style did the author use? If you are unfamiliar with the major documentation styles, check the MLA and APA guidelines available from the Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL). If the style you see does not match MLA or APA, then list whether the article uses in-text citations with a list of sources at the end, or footnotes.

10.Does the introduction to the article contain a “road map” or forecast for the content? (Yes/No). If not, how does the introduction situate the reader to the main idea in the article.

11.Does the article use section headings? (Yes/No). If the article uses headings, list them in the space below. How do these headings help you understand the content of this article?

12.Does your article use charts and tables? (Yes/No). If so, what information do they convey to the reader?

13.What research methodology did the author(s) use? At the very least, indicate whether it’s quantitative or qualitative research and explain why.

14.What do you see as the basic research question this article sought to answer? (Note that some articles announce this early in the essay. If you article did this, copy and paste it in the space below. Otherwise, try to infer what the research question was that the research in your article sought to answer).

15.In the space below, summarize the findings the article presents. This is not necessarily a thesis statement, but the findings usually take a stand on what the study found by conducting research to answer the research question.

16.Is there a “Discussions” section in your article? If so, what is the gist of that section? If there is no “Discussions” section, leave this question blank.

17.How does your article conclude? Summarize the conclusion of the article below. Note that this is not the same thing as the findings.

18.Why did you choose this article for your Annotated Bibliography? What do you see in the findings that you feel would be of interest or relevant to a public audience?

19.What are some potential public audiences (stakeholders, especially those with decision making power)?

20.Which parts of this article will be most important to “translate” clearly for that audience?

Adapted from

Worksheet for Scholarly Article Survey by Jessica Matthews is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. (CC-BY-SA 4.0)