journal article review sample pdf apa

journal article review sample pdf apa

The Importance of Journal Article Reviews in APA Format

1. Introduction to Journal Article Reviews

The purpose of academic journal writing is to disseminate the results of scholarship, and writers for “academic” journals, whether they be philosophers, political scientists, sociologists, psychologists, or historians, often use technical language to do this. Articles are usually peer reviewed, published (in print or online), and written in academic journals. They are written following a specific format depending on the field. The abstract usually includes a summary of the article, and the content is relatively straightforward, though depending on the field, some words might need to be defined. Students studying or researchers starting a career in psychology (or even clinicians coming into the field from other specialties) are often required to review an article in this format. These assignments are often a matter of dispute as they add a subjective quality to an otherwise technical and objective field. This resembles the undergraduate’s journey into the field of psychology and the struggle to find a definite answer where sometimes none is available. Before even beginning to read the article, it will be helpful to understand the following terms: review (specifically article reviews) and abstract. A review is a critical evaluation of the article, and the abstract is a concise summary of the article. Knowing the definitions of these two terms will help the undergraduate better understand the assignment and act accordingly.

2. Understanding the APA Format

In understanding the APA format, you need to consider the format of an article review. Your review should start with an introduction which states the purpose of the article. Then go on to prepare the Methods section, in which you give the reader enough information to accurately replicate your study without providing any unnecessary details. I would like to note here that there is an opportunity to prep readers of your study for your online appendix, where you could provide more detailed information for those who are interested in a very detailed explanation of your study. The Method section could also be followed by a Theoretical Explanations and Hypotheses section if needed. After, write the Results and Discussion section. This is where your review will actually start. In this section, you should objectively report what you have learned after reading the article. Try to not include your personal opinions about the article. Finally, end with a summarization of the key points of the article. Note that this article summary should be no longer than two pages and it must not include your personal asides. Remember to italicize the article title at the beginning of your article review.

3. Sample Journal Article Review in PDF Format

The authors then examined the plural principal, which they define as a number of organized value systems existing simultaneously within a single social unit. They say that a society will have many plural principals and that the concept has a normative aspect in that one of these value systems could hire a public administrator to further its own goals. This could lead to conflicting expectations of how the administrator should perform his duties. The plural principal model is said to differ from other models of public organizations and administrator decision making in that it is a generalized view that can be applied to various administrations and decisions.

A study of superintendents selected a random sample to participate in an exercise of constructing, stating, and maximizing a value rule. This was the first of two studies aimed to explore value systems in the public sector. The second study sought to study how value systems influence choice. This second study involved a series of either/or choice questions among a different sample of school administrators. In both studies, they say that the results generally confirmed the belief that the public sector has a complex array of value systems and that public servants often need to make decisions involving conflicting values.

The authors begin with an examination of the concept of administrator value complexity, which they say is an indispensable element of the public sector. They say that administrators hold “conspicuously different values” than those in the private sector and that a comparison of the two value systems would prove to be unfavorable to the public sector.

The article, “Administrators and Accountability: The Plurality of Value Systems in the Public Sector,” by Sechrest and Shelby, builds upon a framework of the “plural principal” and attempts to show how this framework can be used to describe and account for the various value systems within the public sector. They also argue that the plural principal can provide a guide for administrator decision making.

4. Key Elements of an Effective Journal Article Review

Writing a comprehensive, accurate review creates a constructive, informative, and visionary resource for researchers as well as improving their skills as a critical reviewer. It’s easy to fall into the habit of writing a summary, which is not the goal of a review. A good review not only summarizes but also evaluates, clearly interprets the data, and explains the relevance to the topic, other studies, and the field as a whole. A review should also be constructive. The reviewer’s job is to identify any issues, not to criticize. By careful, thoughtful identification and articulation of the problems, it is often possible to start to work towards a solution. Always remember that there is no such thing as a perfect study. Treat each identified issue as an objective of improvement for the next iteration of the study, not a weakness that reflects on the researchers. Regularly revisiting the article is also important to verify the accuracy of your evaluation. New insights can be made which may change your opinion of the article. Finally, a good review should be well-written, free from as many grammatical mistakes as possible, and should be tailored to the journal. By saying something simple like “This study could be improved,” a lot of information has been omitted. What exactly could be improved? Were there any specific limitations? Remember to be precise in your evaluations. The more specific the comments, the more useful they will be to the author.

5. Conclusion and Recommendations

Time restraints were responsible for it being rather difficult to find a particularly captivating article on an experimental study to the best of my knowledge JO and ME didn’t have too much difficulty, and TB and ZZ got together and settled on a less than enthralling first find that did the job for the assignment. I think that an assignment should be done on a more interesting article than was probably the case for many students, but it’s hard to appropriate the blame on anything other than vagaries among individual choice. This article did the job, but it was a post from the second choice article that did not fill the requirement, and no help could be given here. In consideration of what our weak example has shown. Sourcing an article can very much be hit or miss on whether it will be helpful or appropriate to the assignment, and just as well sometimes teacher input may be needed, but this is not always immediately forthcoming and may not be a meantime inefficient fitting in with our time restraint problem. This is less a reflection of APA format and more the nature of our success in finding an article.

Possibly the most clear-cut result of this review was that our use of APA format in the completion of this assignment has made us all entirely too familiar with APA format overall – if anyone tries to claim that they haven’t had to glance back at the manual a time or two to set up their references or in-text citations, they’re lying. Unfortunately, a lot of this masochistic sense of accomplishment comes because of Johnson’s zeal for crucifying students for minor errors in APA citation, and while this can be conceded to be slightly important, the fact remains that excessive time spent pouring over APA format is excessive time not spent learning anything else. Johnson does make a reference to the helpfulness of his getting students to learn APA format to better internalize psychological writing style in another assignment, and while this does indeed have some utility, it is hard to see where spending five hours merely to write up a four-page article’s worth of information is actually serving to reinforce anything, especially in the absence of instruction. This culminates in lack of reinforcement and ultimately lost information. An article analysis or review is very often an assignment in a psychology course, no matter what the level, and more often than not, the ability to grasp article content and to critique is an important skill to have for the applier of any information from the simplest lab report to professional work in the field, and yet this is the sort of thing that may fall to the wayside as one struggles to adhere to specified formats and citation styles. How the student draws a balance between the necessity to follow a format and the necessity to actually learn material is largely up to the individual, and while it seems that with more practice, APA style will become less of an obstacle and less time will be required to function at the same level, the adoption of this excessively rigid academic writing style still remains a hindrance on information retention and actual learning. APA style is undeniably important in the end for the student of psychology or someone who will be submitting work to and professional in the field, but it’s very easy to get lost in the trees to forget the forest.

This paper described the importance of APA style to report on and to test the effects of environment on an organism’s preference for mates, using a genuine article reporting on the effects of different music genres on the mating behavior of two fish species (Heath, Schradin, Keckeis, & Blumstein, 2010). We conducted a journal article review, providing a summary, an evaluation, critique, and a suggested new direction for the research. Although this review adhered to APA style and was fairly concise, the utility of APA style in the absence of instruction was unclear – information on APA style is more difficult to stick to when it hasn’t been internalized due to the presence of so much other information to juggle.