how to write a journal article review

how to write a journal article review

Writing a Journal Article Review

1. Introduction

The ability to write a succinctly focused article is an essential skill for the academic doctor. Succinct scientific writing reduces the burden on the peer reviewer and the editorial staff; a single well-crafted article can have more impact than several diffuse reports. In the era of information overload, readers need to quickly understand the content and relevance of an article. Succinct writing enables readers to do this. Finally, a focused, well-written article is more likely to be influential and aid the progress of science. Current and future researchers can learn from it, use its concepts and methods in their own work, and build on its results. A poorly written article burdens its readers, and may actually deter some from bothering to plough through it to tease out its useful content. Awareness of the importance of clear, focused writing is a good start to this essential task. But how can one learn to write more effectively? This article is a guide to the process of writing a journal article, exploring a detailed structure of the abstract and 11 full-length paragraphs.

2. Understanding the Structure of a Journal Article

There are several parts of a journal article, though the specific content and style of articles will vary depending on the discipline and the specific journal. The greatest variation lies in the empirical paper. This is because even within a single discipline, there are great qualitative and quantitative differences in how research is conducted and reported. However, there is a general pattern that is common to all or most journal articles that is worth considering. This is particularly important in reading and critically evaluating an article. It will also be useful when you come to write your own articles. The general structure of a journal article is as follows: Title, Abstract, Introduction, Method, Results, Discussion, References. There is also considerable variation in the structure of the above parts, creating some difficulty in defining the structure of a journal article in general. However, it is possible to provide some general guidelines and comments about the parts that are common to most articles.

3. Analyzing the Content and Arguments

The content of a journal article is often well summarized in the abstract and introduction. There is a need to look for the various forms of content. A research article will typically contain 3 content categories: core content, transitional content, and extra information. Core content is the heart of the article and is really needed to understand the article. It will be speculated on the next page and must be read word for word by the reader. Core content typically is found in the research results area of the article. Transitional content links core content and extra information. It is often skimmable as the details of it are not critical to understanding the article. Information articles differ from research articles in the amount of core content vs. transitional and extra information. A core information article will have more evenly distributed content which will be more heuristic providing guidance or direction. It will contain more knowledge integration where research articles will contain original data. Extra information in an information article takes the form of providing more information on something which was mentioned in core content. This will take the form of elaboration and will be connected via links back to core content. Core content of an information article is often news to the reader and the extra information is background information on what the reader is reading.

4. Crafting a Critical Evaluation

A good method for evaluating the article is by outlining the positive and negative aspects of the article. Highlight the possible evidence and the best arguments in the article. Based on this, you can better evaluate the effectiveness of the article. In which case, it will be easier to provide evidence behind the opinions. From this, we may have an overall evaluation of the article, leading to a final conclusion on the article. During this process, it is important to differentiate the opinions from the facts. Always consider giving the author the benefit of the doubt when trying to disprove something. A quality critical evaluation will end with a reaffirmation of your article’s main point and its value to the targeted audience. This also points out that a critical evaluation is more than just a review; it is an in-depth assessment of a work in its particular field of study.

Crafting a critical evaluation of an article involves taking the ideas presented in the piece, summarizing and analyzing it while assessing the value of the work in the particular field. In your evaluation of the article, you want to think about your article’s strengths and weaknesses, and if it has contributed to the particular field of study. This is an important point because the purpose of the article is to inform its readers of a particular subject matter and if the article is not performing this function, it has little value. The evaluation will discuss your opinions of the work and present valid evidence and arguments for these opinions. This will be an informed reflection of your thoughts on the article, backed up with evidence, arguments, and a concise logical conclusion.

5. Conclusion and Recommendations

In conclusion, the results of the current study indicate that participants were more consistent and significantly faster writing texts with predictive text and auto-complete technologies. In regards to Problem Recognition Tasks, where the text is dialogic, the task is more creative and the expectations are more vague than specific text generation, we found some significant differences. Task 2 (to write an interesting story on how you found your most prized possession) had a very low completion rate as most participants could not think of a good or interesting prize, but all conditions had at least 75% of participants completing the task. For the Third Task, there were very interesting results. The control group took the attempt to handwrite a story resulting in a very consistent rate of total words written. The two experimental conditions, on the other hand, resulted in similar numbers of total words again, but the time taken to write these varied significantly. Unfortunately, participants in the handwriting condition were fairly resistant to simply trying to decide on a topic to write using a prompt; some of these participants even tried to write down the prompt. This led to a high number of words written that were prompt unrelated, and the completion rate went down to 50%. Overall, the completion rates and word productivity lead to some confidence in saying that we have discovered a truly beneficial method for prompting text generation tasks. Lastly, there were many failed writing attempts, especially in the dialog passage and story writing tasks, due to several external factors and interrupted session attempts. So we believe that the logging of task completion rate and time taken to write the tasks will greatly enhance future research data.