Evaluating Sources: How to Read and Evaluate Articles

This Guide is intended to help library users evaluate sources and critically read journal, magazine and news articles.

• Introduction
• Search Engines: Library Databases vs. Google
• How to Read and Evaluate Articles
• Other Useful Resources

How to Read and Evaluate Articles

Evaluating Articles

Learning to read and evaluate articles is an important skill to develop in your academic career. These guidelines apply equally to evaluating scholarly and popular articles.

• Purpose of the article - why was it written? To inform, persuade, to present results of a study? Many journal articles will present results of original research and are peer-reviewed for quality.
• Type of journal or publication - who published it? An excellent comparison between publication types can be found at this Colorado State page.
  • Scholarly journals often have the word journal in the title, for example Journal of the American Medical Association, Journal of Federalism. Some journals may not, such as Perspectives on Political Science and Cognitive Therapy and Research. Often, journals are published by professional organizations, such as the American Psychological Association or American Medical Association.
  • Trade magazines and news magazines might be appropriate, depending on your topic. Trade magazines are often published by industry associations, such as the National Restaurant Association.
• Bias of the publisher - this is not really an issue with academic publishers, but is definitely something to be aware of when researching political, anthropological or controversial topics. Some publications will be left wing/liberal, right wing/conservative, centrist, or even alternative press. Ask a librarian or your instructor for help in determining bias.
• Date of publication - sometimes currency matters (as in health care or in news coverage). So look for date of publication. Databases allow you to easily limit results by date.
• Usefulness - is the article relevant to your current project? If it is useful, does it:
  • Support an argument
  • Refute an argument
  • Provide background information
  • Give examples (survey results, research results, case studies, etc.)
• Bibliography - this is an important thing to look for. Scholarly works always have a bibliography of resources consulted. Another thing to consider is how much the author has been cited. This is a good indicator that other experts in the field find the author(s) work credible and of value. The library search system has a tool that appears in many scholarly article results leading you to a list of articles citing that particular article. Look for the red arrows in the upper right part of the results.

Based on excellent materials from Research Guides at Colorado State and Indiana University.

Reading a Scientific or Peer-reviewed Article

Indiana University has an excellent page on reading scientific articles (and includes a video). The information is summarized below.

Scholarly articles (especially peer-reviewed articles) have distinct sections that help you understand what is being presented:

• Title - the title of an article often has clues on the content and purpose of the article (i.e. study).
• Abstract - this is a summary of the article, and appears in library databases and as the Description in the library search system results. These should be closely read to determine the relevance of the article to your research.
• Introduction - this section informs the reader about the purpose of the article and presents the research questions the authors are hoping to answer. A hypothesis may also be presented. Either the Introduction or a Literature Review will summarize the current state of knowledge and research about the topic of the article.
• Method(s) - this section will cover what tools and methods the authors used to conduct their research. Sample sizes are also often included here. Once you become familiar with common methodologies in a discipline, you can analyze how the methodologies used in this article compare with methods used in other articles about the same topic.
• Results - this section presents the results of the experiments and usually have tables or charts and dense details about statistical analysis. Often, the relationship of the hypothesis to the results can be found in this section.
• Discussion - this section is very helpful because it describes the findings in fairly simple English. New discoveries or interesting findings are usually included and often the authors will suggest future directions for research.
• Conclusion - the conclusion summarizes the findings of the research and may also suggest future directions for research.
• Bibliography or References - this section contains a list of sources that the authors consulted. If the article you read is helpful, you may want to track down some of these sources to save research time. Ask a librarian how to find these resources.

For more details and other tips, check out the How to Read a Scientific Paper page at Indiana University.