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How to Know if it is a Research Article

A research article is a journal article in which a researcher (or a team of researchers) publishes the results of their original, empirical research.  All research articles are scholarly, but not all scholarly articles are research.  Library databases include citations to all sorts of sources. Consequently, it's important to be able to determine if an article is a research article, or if it's something else.

How can you tell if it's a research article?

Confirm that it is a scholarly article.  It should be published in a scholarly journal and not a newspaper or popular magazine. The authors should be experts in the field and not journalists.  The article must have a reference list. If the article does not have these elements it is not scholarly, and it cannot be a research article.

The article should clearly state that the author(s) conducted research, ran surveys, did experiments, collected data, or otherwise gathered material on their own or with a team of researchers.  It must be original research conducted by the authors of the research article, and needs to be identified as such.

A research article is different than a review article, which is a critical evaluation of material that has been previously published. This can be done to assess the state of the literature on a topic (which is a literature review), and to suggest steps for future research.

The abstract often has clues.  Look for a sentence that says something like “this study examines…” or “we did research to find…”  Such statements indicate that the author probably conducted original research

Research article format

Research articles typically follow a particular format, and include specific elements that show how the research was designed, how the data was gathered, how it was analyzed, and what the conclusions are. Sometimes these sections may be labeled a bit differently, but these basic elements are consistent:

Abstract: A brief, comprehensive summary of the article, written by  the author(s) of the article. This abstract must be part of the article, not a  summary in the database.

Introduction: This introduces the problem, tells you why it’s important, and outlines the background, purpose, and hypotheses the authors are trying to test. The introduction comes first, just after the abstract, and is usually not labeled.

Method: Tells the reader describes in details how the research was conducted, and may be subdivided into subsections describing Materials,  Apparatus, Subjects, Design, and Procedures.

Results: Summarizes the data and describes how it was analyzed. It should be sufficiently detailed to justify the conclusions. 

Discussion: The authors explain how the data fits their original hypothesis, state their conclusions, and look at the theoretical and practical implications of their research.

References: Lists the complete bibliography of sources cited in the research article.