scholarly article reviews

scholarly article reviews

The Importance and Impact of Scholarly Article Reviews in Academic Research

1. Introduction to Scholarly Article Reviews

The importance of careful reviews in the research process. While a study focus varies, student research projects have many common elements. They may all start with a class topic or a discussion of what may be interesting to study. As interest results in a potential research project, students or newly-minted advanced graduate students, typically in upper-level classes or in graduate programs, look for initial information about their topic. Class instructors assist students in identifying potential research sources and encouragement is typically given to consult journal articles. After selecting a research project topic, this background information can be used to develop a potential review of the scholarly literature. Based on the continuous core aspect of the design of a research article, students may also provide a review of the scholarly literature. Regardless, student or novice researchers look for journal articles as their primary source of reference material. It is important to select journal articles as these articles provide a thorough review of the literature. This chapter highlights the importance of article reviews in the educational research process.

Scholars around the globe write articles daily. Hence, to keep up to date in any field, for teaching purposes, and for actual educational research, one needs to review articles regularly. Educators need to read scholarly articles to stay current with research, to select topics for the classroom, and to support the instruction that takes place in the classroom. Without careful attention, educators might simply rely on their preferred source of information, whether a newspaper, magazine, or single journal, and a particular view of an issue might be presented. A more balanced, thorough treatment of an educational issue could occur based on a review of scholarly articles from multiple academic journals. This chapter identifies the importance of scholarly articles and activities for maintaining up-to-date articles about educational research.

2. Benefits of Engaging in Scholarly Article Reviews

Finally, using a common modeling approach and providing helpful feedback on the inferences a specific study is generating can prevent several student researchers from focusing too much on demonstrating that their frameworks exist without considering the weighted levels of their variables. This is, indeed, the opposite reason why some benchmarks should be ‘incorporated’ in the training of the student researchers: attracting the scholars to overfit too much and produce results that are not necessarily true. Therefore, well-designed assignments on scholarly article reviews should not be a source of friction or confrontation, nor should they discourage creativity and the generation of new ideas. Instead, they should encourage the next generation of researchers to engage in productive discussions that can facilitate the progress of producing high-quality research.

Through scholarly article reviews, students can develop a deeper appreciation for the importance of good writing and the value of brevity, clarity, and coherence, and develop critical analytical abilities to assess the limitations of the existing literature. Furthermore, engaging students in reading scholarly works by other students (i.e., from my previous classes) could encourage them to push the limits of their abilities to generate exciting discoveries that build on one another’s findings. In other words, scholarly article reviews provide students with the opportunity to understand what it means to contribute to a larger scientific intuition over a lifetime of informed exploration. Intuitive good writing facilitates engagement rather than serving as a condition to overcome when reviewing scholarly articles, and it is easier for students to know good writing when they see it.

3. Challenges and Pitfalls in Conducting Scholarly Article Reviews

Students very often get overwhelmed by the vastness of academic research papers available. They do not know which particular paper presents a good starting point. Teachers are usually willing to provide a list of articles that they think is relevant to a course. There usually is precious little time to go through the list, let alone to scan more literature. Often, teachers allow students to dip into whatever articles available only after concentrating on a single paper or two suggested by the teacher, which makes it resolution to get the appropriate articles at a later stage, as the student becomes more acquainted with related work already available.

Even with ample motivation, aptitude, and effort, student researchers (or scholars-in-the-making who have recently graduated to conducting research in a professional research setting) will find it challenging to gain a solid command over the patterns and processes in research published in a given field of professional academic expertise, especially during the early stages of their research training. Early on, categorical synthesis tends to be ineffective or misleading, especially if students are constrained by time to rapidly produce a research paper and expected to know how to properly approach the research process. Is this a situation familiar? How can the feasibility of coming up with a scholarly article review be improved? Here, I describe some ways which can be used to circumvent a few of the challenges which students newly introduced to the academic research field might experience, and to avoid falling into the common traps associated with scholarly article reviews.

4. Best Practices for Writing Scholarly Article Reviews

A review of a scholarly article serves a twofold purpose. It is meant both for the editors of academic journals and for academic authors. The purpose of the former is the selection of the articles to be published in its journal. Upon the author, the review has the impact of an expert hearing one’s work – it serves as a strict but constructive critique of its ideas and presentation, and it outlines steps for improvement. These 10 guidelines for writing such expert critiques are based on an overview of the scholarly, and particularly poststructuralist, ideas about what makes a good review. Also included are some recommendations which pertain to other aspects of the article-reviewing process, such as its general conclusion. With these recommendations this author hopes to provide more enlightenment, and thereby improve the efficacy, of the journal system, particularly within the Korean accounting and finance domain.

When you are asked to write a review of a scholarly article, you should consider how the paper looks, what its revelations are, how it can be further developed, and so forth. A good review requires both rigorous analysis and communication. However, most of the current guides consist of skill generalizations alone and no topic-specific guidelines, thus nurturing a lot of poor reviews. In the absence of an agreement on such threshold standards, it is not possible to put in place concrete steps for improvement on the Korean systems of scholarly article reviewing. The purpose of this paper is to outline best practices for writing scholarly article reviews with recommendations which are based on a synthesis and overview of the theory and practice of scholarly article reviewing. Each of the ten sections which follow offers a set of practical, discipline-specific tips.

5. Conclusion and Future Directions

In this article, we have highlighted the opportunity that can arise when the scholarly communicative component becomes an anticipated facet of scientific research. We showed that an experienced and diverse set of both internal and external reviewers endorsed the educational value and novelty of the journal and even expressed the desire to see such scholarly work accompany future publications. The annotated bibliographic reviews of these publishing papers reveal the academic landscape and showcase the reviewers’ drive for enhancing students’ understanding of the related science. Mentorship, knowledge of the implication of the research, key contributions, and critical assessment of the article provided in the review and highlighted in the annotated bibliography provide a valuable service to both students and instructors alike.

The bottom line is, you would be wise to invest your limited time in improving the current barometers of scientific contribution. Yet the ability of a discipline to self-reflect and to mentor, by providing context and guidance to future generations, is exacerbated by a measure that values a highly readable resource available to an academic who has little time to read up on the latest key papers.

In conclusion, scholarly reviews and annotations take on a life of their own as an important form of scientific output. They are time-consuming to produce due to the need to interpret the material and summarize complex, high-quality articles into a representational form that educates the readers. Despite their importance both to the scientific community and to education, they are undervalued by academic reward systems. This situation is unlikely to change in the near future given the immense pressure to publish, particularly in the experimental research areas formed by seed funding requirements.