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5.4: Read Your Sources

  • Page ID
    275288
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    How to read journal articles

    In the last section, you scanned your articles, which is like getting a birds-eye view of the source. Click the link below to watch Prof. David Stuckler's 10-minute video on how to read journal articles. He'll take you from the birds eye view and drill down to what he calls "the street map view".

    How to critically analyze journal articles

    To determine if you want to cite an article in your literature review, you need to not only understand it, but also evaluate it. These are both steps in critically analyzing journal articles. When you write about the articles, you'll additionally need to describe them. Critically, for a literature review, you'll need to synthesize your sources.

    “...you look at the article and you go, okay, I am not skilled enough to determine the validity of this yet, or, I don’t have a sense of the field and to know who was in the field...I’ve started to kind of pick up on...how many times it’s been cited...But it still feels like I’m having trouble determining validity versus, you know, public acceptance.” (Graduate student participant as cited in Droog et al. 2024, p. 843)

    Click the link below to watch Dr. Elizabeth Yardley's 10-minute video to learn to describe, interpret, evaluate, and synthesize articles:

    But remember that you’re not going to write a book report. Instead, you'll incorporate the article as part of the context for your study. The above video covers this particularly well, starting at [8:21]

    While you’re reading your sources, keep the following in mind:

    • The patterns you noted in the previous chapter
    • How does this article connect to the other articles?
    • How does it connect to your interest?

    Learn by listening: If you prefer to learn by listening, rather than reading visually, many tools will read the article to you. The downside is you have to then read the article from start to finish, which is good for reading a novel, but not as useful for reading articles. Some tools are advanced enough to let you jump around based on the heading or section, so be sure to use those tools if you choose to listen.

    Note

    I recommend taking notes after you finish reading. If it helps you focus to write a little on the PDFs as you read, that’s fine. I often write a little in the margins, underline, etc. But I encourage you to wait to take separate notes. Again, this doesn’t mean you double your time. Instead, you spend the same amount of time, just in a different order. And it will save you time when you’re writing because your notes will be better.

    In Practice:

    Finally! It's time to read your sources.

    Activity: Read! \(\PageIndex{1}\)

    Read all of the 5-10 sources you’ve collected. Do not yet take notes on any one source. We’ll do that in the next chapter.

    Next Steps:

    Next, we'll talk about note taking strategies specific to help you later when you're writing the literature review.


    This page titled 5.4: Read Your Sources is shared under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Frances Brady.