Reading a scholarly article is different than reading a novel You don't have to read every word from beginning to end at least not to start with. I'm going to walk you through how I read a scholarly article in order to help you increase your comprehension while saving you some time. Before you begin reading be sure you have a clear topic statement or research question in mind Mine is, "how to use social networking sites like Facebook and YouTube contribute to bullying in schools and how can this situation be prevented?
" Here I've identified some search keywords which I've used to find a scholarly article in an EBSCOhost database. The article I've chosen is called "Parental mediation: Online activities and cyber-bullying" written by a researcher named Mesch and this is from the journal Cyber Psychology and Behavior Let's open up the full text of this article and have a look The first step is to read the Abstract This is a summary of the article which will help me to decide if it's relevant to my topic This article is a research study on a fairly new topic in the field of psychology It looks like they found that parenting is an important factor in cyberbullying By the way it's good to make note of key terms like "cyberbullying" that the professionals are using This term could be useful for future searches Based on the abstract I can see that this article may help me answer my research question so I'll go ahead and have a closer look. Rather than reading this nine-page article word-for-word, I'll start by reading the introduction.
I'll just let my eyes can quickly over the sentences looking for key ideas. I may want to paraphrase or quote these ideas later so if I were reading this in print I would highlight or underline them. I also notice that the author frequently refers to other research studies This is common practice in scholarly literature; the author is providing me some context by summarizing what else has been published on this topic If I wish, I may look up his cited articles later on Here he gets into parental mediation, one of his main points He also points out the potential flaws in his study which gives him points for honesty.
Still, this article went through the process of peer review, so I can be pretty confident of his findings. Speaking of findings there are some key sections that are typical of research articles like this We've seen the Abstract and Introduction You'll also find a Conclusion section near the end It may be called something else; in this case it's called Discussion but it basically tells us what the researcher discovered in doing his study I'm going to skip to this section right now. Remember we're not reading a novel so it's okay to peek at the ending Some of Mesch's findings sound interesting to me so I highlight or underline them Since he's piqued my curiosity about rules for visiting web sites I'll go back to the Results section to read his findings in more detail He goes into a lot of statistics, which is typical of a research study Sometimes I read the narrative discussion of the results but sometimes I glance first at a stats table to get a quick visual overview For instance I quickly noticed that kids with more highly educated parents weren't necessarily less likely to be bullied.
I can read the narrative description to find out why Ah, here's where he talks about parental roles and how they seem to have a beneficial effect I'll probably read the results in more detail but I should point out the Methods section; this section will tell me what kind of research the author did, a survey in this case, how it was conducted, and details about the participants After discussing the results of his study the author recommends further research that his colleagues in the field may want to do Finally, don't overlook the References section at the end This isn't just here to impress you with how much Dr Mesch has read on this topic; This list and the accompanying footnotes allow you to read on this topic in more detail if you wish That's part of the scholarly process -- helping others learn while advancing the level of knowledge in one's field of study.
