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Useful Tips on How to Write Article Reviews

What is an article review and how can we write it? In some cases, students may be asked not to use any article as a primary source. A teacher may only ask their students to prepare a good review on certain academic, scientific, or scholarly articles.

The purpose of such tasks is to assess students’ abilities to find some related articles after profound article research. Thus, students acquire basic skills of writing article summaries.

Article reviews aim at presenting a well-structured, critical assessment of a particular literature. Therefore, compiling an article review is not merely about writing a summary.

Students have to conduct thorough research within their article reviews. Each article review consists of theoretical and objective discussions, which help to learn more about exploring, assessing data, and being able to share personal critical views. These skills are vital for reaching the height of one’s profession.

Key Aspects of Writing an Article Review

The target for an article review is the audience that is familiar with a certain discipline. Choosing the language, all students use the official English language. All article reviews consist of the reflective and evaluative parts of the main arguments.

This is the process of how to work on an article review:

Write an article summary + classify main points + do a comprehensive analysis + prepare a critique on the article + contrast main points
Include some related theories, key facts, and do all-round research
As a rule, article reviews introduce some useful responses to other writers’ pieces and don’t provide any new information on the topic

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Get Prepared to Evaluate with Article Analysis

In order to present an accurate article review, students have to go through some pre-writing stages.

There is a brief summary of the main pre-writing stages. Take them into consideration before starting your article review. Thus, kick off compiling your paper with:

  1. Defining the audience. You will find a great difference in your peers’ and professionals’ perception as they do perceive information differently.
  2. Presenting the objectives of the chosen article. What can be achieved by this article critique? Have you got all the needed sources?
  3. Writing down some background information about your article. Students should do that because it can help the readers to get a better understanding of the review. They might even desire to do their own research on the same topic.
  4. Providing a reasonable explanation why you have chosen that very article. You need to present the reason for the chosen article/academic journal to be credible.
  5. Considering the analysis of some previous research before you start working on the content of your article review.
  6. Remembering to define the course. Decide on whether you want to write an empirical or conceptual article.

Structuring the Article Review

An article review should always be well-structured. There has to be a logical division into several parts with each argument properly discussed.

If you want to learn how to write a journal article review, you need to consider the following:

  • Remember to include the hook! One sentence that grabs the readers’ attention may include, for example, some interesting facts, statistics, jokes/anecdotes, life stories, famous quotes, literature quotes, article extracts, etc.
  • Present a good abstract of the article. Your abstract should summarize the key points combining information from the introduction and conclusion.
  • Compose a strong introductory paragraph. A strong thesis is the key to success. Your thesis statement reflects all the key points of the whole article review.
  • Use transition words which help the paper to flow logically.
  • Use direct in-text citations as supporting evidence to prove the credibility of your writing.
  • Use indirect citations such as different statistics, facts, etc. to support your arguments.
  • Choose between objective and subjective critiques of the article by defining research failures, contradictive opinions, content disparity, and unanswered questions.
  • Include results sections. This content part may be called as Findings or Discussion and should include the summary of the information used in the article review and the main arguments.

It is also of the paramount importance to write an outline.

How to Perform a Good Outline for Article Review

In order to do an article review, you should, first, develop a good outline. Start with writing down key points of your article review. Underline all the sentences you would like to use further in your discussion. Present author’s contribution to the research.

By using opposing views, you can show your judgments’ objectivity. You also need to review the most recent findings and discussions of your topic. It is crucial to mention all strengths and weaknesses of your target. Readers have to make their own decisions on whether your paper is really worth their attention or not. Do not let your personal ideas and thoughts lead you astray. They are pretty useful for reflective essays but not for article reviews. The latter must be objective.

Find a few possible outlines for your article review by:

  • Including a pre-title or cover page in a review. If your paper is in APA style, you MUST include a title and continue working in APA on the abstract as well. In order to do that successfully, you should follow the guidelines by adding all the necessary details.
  • Adding some details about the author to the review (optional). For instance, you can add some information on what you’ve got ignoring page numbers if there are no numbers in the article of your choice.
  • Writing in APA, you should include a running head and separate page number for the title/cover page.
  • Including a summary page which is actually an abstract of the article. Remember that the content of the abstract should be different from the content of the introduction. An introduction consists of the only one key point – thesis, while abstract summarizes all key points.
  • Moving to the body paragraphs. Three main points must be mentioned in order to support the main idea of your article review.
  • Ending up article review with a strong conclusion. Your conclusion should start with rewriting of the thesis and then switching to naming key arguments.

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Choose Your Preferred Article Review

The most important thing is to choose the topic. Do research on the most debatable topics discussed in the society at present, whether it is the outcomes of Presidential elections in a certain country, beauty contests, tragic deaths of some film stars, etc. Select an article on the chosen topic and define if it is worth your attention.

Writing a Journal Article Review

Harvard and Yale Universities have held recently several surveys which state that 80% of all students show better performance if they are given an example of required content in front of them. The Internet surely helps to search for the most valuable examples with proper citation and reference information.

To reach excellence in writing article reviews, the writer should read the chosen article several times until the complete understanding of the content of the paper, as well as of its key points, is achieved. If a writer wants to avoid this stage, it will be completely impossible for them to move to the next, evaluative stage.

Follow the tips presented in this article, get well-organized and disciplined. It will help you to write article reviews more effectively.

Wish you all the best! Good luck!

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