MNGT 360

A scholarly article is also referred to as a research or academic article.  Scholarly articles are published in academic journals.  A scholarly article is written by a researcher who is an expert in a particular field and who is sharing the results of original research.

Your professor, Dr. Bartels, has conducted research and written scholarly articles, like this one.

Many (but not all) scholarly articles are published in peer-reviewed journals.  A peer-reviewed journal has an editorial review board, made up other experts in that field, who evaluate submitted manuscripts for quality of research and contributions to knowledge.  The reviewers often come back to the author of the manuscript with questions or suggestions for changes.  In the end, the reviewers recommend whether or not the manuscript should be published in the journal.  (Sounds stressful, doesn't it??)  The peer review process is intended to assess the validity, quality, originality of articles while filtering out invalid or low quality articles.

In some cases you will encounter a scholarly article in the context of its larger journal (e.g., the article is from the Journal of Such and Such).  However, you may come across a document without any context and need to determine whether it is scholarly or not.

As you read through an article, there are some things to look for to identify an article as scholarly:

• Typically a scholarly research article will be preceded by a short abstract.  An abstract is a short summary of the article, typically written by the author. 
• Following the abstract will be an introduction section that provides the background for the research and often includes a literature review, an analysis and synthesis of previously published research articles on the topic. 
• Next the article will describe its study design and methodology (how the research was conducted). 
• The latter part of the article includes the results of the study and its conclusion. 
• Data, in the form of charts, graphs, tables, and statistics may appear in different parts of the article. 
• Following the text of the article will be a list of all of the articles and publications that were used to inform the author's own research.  This list may be called references, bibliography or works cited. 
• The credentials for the author(s) are listed, indicating their status and university or research institute affiliation.

These different sections will normally have headings to indicate them (e.g., Literature Review).

One thing that you will probably notice immediately is that a scholarly article is written in the language of that academic discipline.  The intended primary audience for any scholarly article is other scholars in that discipline--other experts who use and write in a shared language that might not be familiar to the average reader.  In other words, you are probably not going to read a scholarly article to pass the time while riding in the car. . .