How to Read and Review a Journal Article

Journal articles are the gold standard of academic research. If you want to master a field of study, you need to keep abreast of the relevant journals. A journal article is a particular type of writing. Once you grasp the genre, you can read them quickly, take good notes, and write excellent summaries and reviews. It is a great habit to cultivate if you want to master a subject area. By the end of this course, you will know how to do it better than 90 per cent of scholars.

Learning Outcomes

• Discuss the nature of journal articles.

• Apply a sound approach to reading articles and taking notes.

• Write a professional review of a journal article.

Lesson Outline

The course is divided into a theory section and a practice section. The actual content you will learn covers five areas:

1: What is a journal article?

2: Why read journal articles?

3: How to read a journal article

4: How to take notes

5: How to write a review

These skills are so simple and so foundational for scholars that you would imagine every academic has mastered them, but you would be surprised. Few academics can articulate clear and convincing answers to these questions.

Learning Activities

Unit 1 presents the principles. The content of this course is quite simple. It is presented in a series of short videos supplemented by text summaries. After studying the videos, you need to pass a review quiz that covers all the content.

Unit 2 focuses on practice. You will first be walked through some journal article reviews, which are presented in video format. This will show you exactly how to put the principles into practice. Then, we show you how to find journal articles in the SATS library. The course ends with you writing two reviews of your own.

Completion Criteria

To complete the course, you must pass the quiz at the end of Unit 1 and submit the two reviews of journal articles in Unit 2