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Evaluating A Journal Article

Aim

1. To further your understanding of the area of social development.
2. To help you develop the skills necessary in order to extract information from and evaluate academic journal articles.

Reading journal articles can often seem like a daunting prospect. They are usually full of psychological jargon, complicated statistics and what seems like irrelevant and complex information. Journal articles are written so that researchers can replicate the authors' experiments but, as students, your aim is often just to find out what the authors did and what they found. Thus, a lot of the information given may simply be irrelevant. It is, therefore, important that you learn how to read articles so that you gain the relevant information with minimum effort.

Below is a list of the questions I ask myself when I'm reading a journal article. I generally find that (unless I am going to discuss the article in depth in a paper or lecture) I gain all the information I need about a study just by answering the seven questions below.

Your task:

Find a journal article. Have a go at accessing an online article - see the electronic journals skills page for some help.

Read the article and have a go at answering the questions below.

First things first

• Record the title, authors (including initials), journal name, number, date and page numbers. You will need this information for your essay reference list and it's a pain having to go back to the original article to find it.

Correct format:

Sutton, J., Smith, P. K. & Swettenham, J. (1999). Social cognition and bullying: Social inadequacy or skilled manipulation. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 17, 435-450.

• Read the abstract and check the article is relevant to your work.

Questions

1. What is the background behind the research? For example, what factors have been suggested in the past to account for why children become bullies and what are the authors' views? This information will be given in the introduction to the article.
2. What is the aim of the study?
3. Who were the participants? (Method)
4. Summarise the method used in the study. Do not go into too much detail.
5. Summarise the results of the study. Concentrate on the major findings that are relevant to the aims of the study.
6. What were the conclusions that the authors drew from their experiments?
7. What do you think of the study? Record your observations about the study - it's strengths and weaknesses.