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How to Read a Scholarly Article

Guide to reading academic, peer-reviewed articles effectively and efficiently

Objectives

This guide to reading a scholarly article will help you to:

Recognize academic writing as a genre of writing,
Identify the most common parts of academic texts,
Place individual works within a broader network of scholarship using the literature review section.

Picturing Academic Writing

The following handouts provide diagrams of academic writing that may be useful when reading scholarly books and articles:

Article Annotation worksheet
Use this table to identify the key parts of scholarly articles, then compare across articles to see how scholars have asked questions, used evidence, and arrived at their conclusions.

Reading Diagram handout
Compares the components of academic writing between the sciences & social sciences and the humanities.
Created by April Cunningham

Scholarly Patterns handout (PDF)
Outlines the components of academic writing in the social sciences, as well as the common features of the literature review section.