Week 06 - Exploring the Literature Part I: Finding & Digesting Research

Reading and understanding scholarly journal articles Distinguish between high-quality and low-quality journal articles Summarize a journal article

Doing research is complicated, time consuming, and can feel overwhelming. The help learn some skills in making sense of it all.   Photo credit: Cristina Gottardi on Usplash

We can start off by looking at a scientific paper and breaking down all of the parts.

Any paper will have a short summary written by the author that is a great place to start.

Methods: A description of how the studies were conducted, with sufficient detail so that others can repeat them exactly

References: The list of the articles cited in the paper that provide information on the research topic and the methods.

That is the anatomy of a scientific paper.

[Whole Class Activity] Watch the video. Discussion what stands out.  Lockman, T. (2012, August 12) How to read a scholarly journal article. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/EEVftUdfKtQ.

Along with finding the important parts that Lockman describes, it is important for you to be able to summarize the articles.

You can summarize from the abstract, but you won’t get as detailed of information

Find those summaries in the article for better details.

They are usually with the abstract.

What are the main conclusions? How do you use it to inform a literature review

Program evaluation for next semester What population are you interested What is the problem that you are interested in Groups to look for some articles