Is it a scientific article?
How to identify the parts of the scientific article.
What is a scientific article?
Scientific articles are published in scientific journals, focused on research and in-depth subject knowledge. The articles are often about research studies and can be original articles, review articles or theoretical articles. The scientific article is highly valued in scientific publishing because other researchers review the quality of the study before publication. It is called peer review.
How to identify that it is a scientific article
To help you identify that it is a scientific article that you have found, you can search for the journal and read about its focus area and peer review process. You can research where the article authors work.
You are also helped by reading the headings of the text. A scientific article describing a research study often follows a text structure with an introduction, method, results and discussion (called IMRaD). The headings in the IMRaD structure follow the research process:
- Introduction. Contains background to the study, purpose and research questions.
- Method. The methods used are described here. The description should be so detailed that other researchers should be able to assess reliability, credibility and possibly be able to repeat the study.
- Results. It is the report on the results collected by the researchers.
- Discussion and conclusions. The researchers discuss the results linked to previous research and possible practical implications. The method is also discussed and the study's conclusions are presented.
Before the article begins, there is also an abstract, which is a short summary of the purpose, method, results and conclusions. Selected keywords that describe the topic of the article can be found under abstract. The article concludes with a reference list of the sources that have been used in the text.
There are different kinds of articles in scientific journals. The most common types of scientific articles are:
- Original articles in which the author presents empirical studies and describes for the first time the results of a research work.
- Review articles that are critical evaluations in which the author organizes, integrates, and evaluates previously published studies.
- Theoretical articles in which the author presents a new theory, analyses or criticises existing theories based on existing research.
In addition, it is common to categorise original articles according to the methods used. Quantitative methods involve measuring or calculating data and the results are presented in statistics and percentages. Qualitative methods examine phenomena and experiences and the result involves a synthesis (holistic view) of the collected material. Mixed method means that both quantitative and qualitative methods have been used.