Scholarly Journals  

The library staff is here to help you find any book, article or material that you need to succeed with your papers and projects.  Please contact us with your questions:

• Scholarly journals are periodicals in which researchers publish articles on their work. Most often these articles discuss recent research. Journals also publish theoretical discussions and articles that critically review already published work.

• Scholarly journals are typically peer-reviewed journals. Some search engines that search for periodical sources identify whether or not the sources are from peer-reviewed publications, so look for that information when you do searches.

Getting research published in peer-reviewed (also called “refereed”) scholarly journals usually involves three or four steps.

• First, the researcher must submit an article manuscript for consideration.

• Second, the journal editors will send the submission to other scholars who do similar work and who are qualified to review the article. Generally, editors will send submissions to be reviewed by three other scholars.

• Third, editors will evaluate the reviews and decide whether to reject or accept the submission. Usually, the response is either a rejection or an acceptance contingent on the author making revisions.

If the author is asked to make revisions, they must then complete the fourth step, which is to resubmit the article for another round of reviews. Sometimes the article is accepted at this point and other times authors are asked to make further revisions. The process is meant to make sure that only the best, most clearly written and rigorously researched articles are published.

There is some variation in the way journals format research articles, but there is some standard information that is included no matter what the format. Here are some of the key components of articles and the questions they answer:

• “WHAT IS THIS ARTICLE ABOUT?”

Abstract: Most articles start with a paragraph called the “abstract”, which very briefly summarizes the whole article.
Introduction: This section introduces the topic of the article completely and discusses what the article contributes to existing knowledge on the topic.

• “WHAT DO WE ALREADY KNOW ABOUT THIS TOPIC AND WHAT IS LEFT TO DISCOVER?”

Literature review: A review of existing research and theory on the topic is either included in the introduction or comes after the introduction under its own subtitle. The review of literature is meant to discuss previous work on the topic, point out what questions remain, and relate the research presented in the rest of the article to the existing literature. Here should also be a clear discussion of what the hypotheses were at the beginning of the project.

• “HOW DID THE AUTHOR DO THE RESEARCH?”

Methods and data: There is always some discussion of the methods used to conduct the study being reported.

• “WHAT DID THE AUTHOR FIND AND HOW DID THEY FIND IT?”

Analysis and Results: Another important section or sections will be devoted to discussing the kind of analysis that was conducted on the data and what the results are.

• “WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN AND WHY IS IT IMPORTANT?”

Discussion and Conclusion: Articles typically end by discussing what the results mean and how the study contributes to existing knowledge. Here the research questions are answered and it should be clear at this point whether or not the hypotheses were supported or not. The conclusion is usually the final section and it typically places the research in a larger context, explaining the importance of the research and discussing where future research on the topic should be headed.

From: http://www.brockport.edu/sociology/journal.html
September 2005