Tips for reading empirical articles

Tips for reading empirical articles

1. What is an empirical article? Empirical articles can be called by many names including peer reviewed, scholarly, refereed, scientific or academic. These articles are typically found in academic journals, which you will find on the USM library website. There are many different types of journals for different subjects, such as Child Development, Health, Aging, Psychology, and many, many more. It is important to understand the difference between an empirical article and some other source. Empirical articles are found in scholarly journals, are reviewed by experts in the field, and have strict publication requirements. Magazine, newspaper, or Internet website articles (wikipedia) are NOT empirical. Empirical articles can be intimidating, so here are some tips on how to read and understand empirical articles.
2. There are basically 2 types of articles that you might find in a scholarly journal:

Original (Primary) – This is where a person, or a group of people, have performed their own research, collected their own data and are reporting the unique results of their findings. This is an empirical article.

Review (Secondary) – This is where someone has looked at other people’s research and has compiled information about a certain topic from several different sources. Reviews can be helpful in determining trends or getting a general overview of what has already been researched about a topic. However, these are NOT considered empirical because they are not based on original research.

3. Read the abstract first. This is a summary of what the article is about, and will help to give you the main idea before you start.
4. Ask yourself a few questions:

Who is being studied? (teenagers, the elderly, women, a certain ethnic group, college students, etc)

What are they trying to figure out? (attitudes about something, links between two variables, effectiveness of a certain program, this list could go on and on…)

How did they figure this out? (a questionnaire, interviews, an observation, a long term study, an experiment, etc.)

What did they find? (was the hypothesis correct?, a correlation between two things, something is causing something else, how people really feel about a topic, etc.)

What does this mean for you? (does this information support your stance on an issue? refute it? did you learn something about a group of people, how can we use this information to help people? etc.)

5. Journal articles are divided into sections (these may vary a little bit from article to article, but this is a basic outline of what you will typically find):

· Abstract – This is a basic summary of the entire article.

· Introduction- This explains why this topic information is important, and gives a general explanation of the topic, etc.

· Literature Review – This explains what we already know about a topic based on previous research. The authors will typically use data from several other empirical articles that have been previously published to give a history of what has already been found out about this topic.

· Methodology – This gives the step by step explanation of how the authors conducted their research. This section will tell you who was studied, how many people, their ages, ethnicity, etc. It will also explain how the data was collected, such as an interview, a questionnaire, an experiment, etc. This section basically just explains the exact process that the authors went through to get to their findings.

· Results – This section gives the actual data that resulted from the research. There will typically be a lot of numerical data, graphs and charts, and a lot of technical terms in this section. For example, the authors will state how many participants answered a certain way, or give a breakdown of percentages of how subjects scored on an assessment, etc.

· Discussion – This is the section that actually explains what the results mean. The results section can be difficult to understand, but they usually give a more clear picture of the findings in the discussion section. Read this section carefully, as it will explain what the researchers found during their study.

· Conclusion – This tells the reader how the information can be applied to real life, and explains what these findings mean for the field of study. Some suggestions might be given on what further research needs to be done, or how professionals can use this information.

· References – This is the section where the authors give appropriate credit for the sources they used when writing their paper. If the author refers to previous research in the literature review or introduction, the details of that previous research will be found in the reference section.