Brad Hall

While most citations in a scholarly article refer to already published research or engage with theoretical materials, occasionally you will find it necessary to discuss magazine articles or reviews, online works, and other kinds of non-scholarly or non-academic sources. In part, engaging with these types of materials illustrates the continued relevancy of your research in the public realm. If you are discussing representations of war in literature, for example, it may be productive to think about reviews of such representations in contemporary popular culture. Connecting with public and popular media situates your research the “real world” and adds immediacy to your piece.

How do you summarize arguments for academic articles such as a literature review? Clearly, any argument you write should speak to other, previously published texts. You are in a conversation with your field and will want to engage with other scholarly works, theoretical pieces, or bodies of research. Your article’s engagement with these secondary sources will help to bolster your argument and form a basis for your discussion. However, you want to work with these earlier sources in an intelligent and sophisticated way.

Research articles, especially in the STEM fields, have a rigid structure that almost all journals will expect to be followed. This makes sense, as it forces publications to be uniform, easier to follow, and allows for the reading of particular sections. Someone interested in the statistical methods used, doesn’t need to skim through the whole article to find them. They will be included in the methods; thus only the methods would need to be read.

The challenges of choosing a specific research article topic can be daunting to a new scholar. You want one that is interesting to you and emerges from your current area of research. At the same time, it should be new, innovative, and valuable to the field. Here are some strategies to help produce a dynamic, effective research topic:

Narrow your area

Conferences are fantastic places to give an initial version of your current project when your research is dynamic and evolving. Fellow conference goers provide significant sources of initial feedback, especially from scholars you don’t know or with whom you interact less frequently. In addition, many conferences have associated journals, which have special editions with articles drawn from the conference. Given that journals often prefer already curated submissions to cold entries, your previous acceptance to the conference may help your submission to the associated journal.

We have all been there — the methods section of a research paper that seems to be talking in circles, when all you really need is a few facts about the statistical methods used. For many researchers, academic sources for their research articles can be overly complicated and too wordy to understand at times. No style of reading works for everyone, but there are general reading tips that are useful, whether used all together or mixed and matched. By using the tips below, you will be reading academic sources effectively without feeling overwhelmed.

Proofreading is essential for any written work. An otherwise excellent research publication can be ruined by multiple typos. Below are effective strategies for proofreading your research articles.

A good research question will guide and centre your research. It may consider the relationships between certain theories or ideas, or attempt to answer what is happening in a specific situation. Ideally, you should be interested in the topic you choose to investigate. If you are unfamiliar with the topic, you should also conduct preliminary research. A good literature review can summarize a given research area and lead to inspiration.

A literature review is an exhaustive discussion of the research previously done in a given subject area. It is an organized collection of published research about a topic. Literature reviews are conducted in order to provide a solid background of the topic, examine what areas of research exist, and find new routes of research. While it may be a summary of the material, usually the literature review shuffles information around to shed new light on research.