Secrets of My Research Success:
Article Selection

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Hmmm… from looking at the titles of the articles, some of them sound good. But how do I know if the article is relevant to my research ?


First you will need to evaluate individual articles to determine whether any of them are worth pursuing. You don't want to read a twenty page article and then find out that it is not related to your research. Although scholarly articles are good sources, articles from magazines and trade publications, which are written to provide news or information to members within a specific profession, may also contain information relevant to your paper. Remember that some topics will not have a lot of scholarly articles published about them. Let's look at this Wall Street Journal Article as an example.

It opens up the record to get more detailed information about the article. If you are looking for scholarly articles, the author's credentials and journal name will be important. If current information is important you will need to pay attention to the publication date. The number of pages is also something to consider. If an article is only 1-2 pages it can't go into any depth to be valuable for a research paper. However, if you are looking for quick information a shorter article can be useful. Remember to also look for the subject terms and include any that appear to be useful for further searching. Finally, you will want to read the abstract or summary to get an idea of what the article is about.