The title will provide a good indication of what the article is about although you will need to read the abstract to get a better overview. However, it may be enough to screen out articles that are clearly not related to your assignment.
"How to read a journal article" by Teeside University Library licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 / modified from original with additional text.
The abstract is presented at the top of the article and is a concise summary of the whole article highlighting the focus, study results and conclusion(s) of the article.
Read it in depth, It will help you identify whether the article is useful to you.
In this section, the authors introduce their topic and explain the purpose of the study and present their main argument and hypothesis.
Scan over the Introduction for key ideas which provide a background to the study, look for why its important and how it adds to existing knowledge in the field. Also scan for a summary of previous research in the field that the authors may have found in their 'Literature Review'.
The conclusion is near the end of the article, it may have other names, such as discussion.
Reading this section will enable you to see the main points from the article.
It may include how the study addressed the author's question, how it contributes to the subject/field of research, the strengths and weaknesses of the study, and recommendations/implications for future research or action. Its good to understand these conclusions before reading the detail of the results and the methodology
This section gives detailed findings (results and analysis) collected from the research. Sometimes these can appear off-putting or confusing so try to identify the main points.
There are often tables of data, graphs, statistics and figures as well as text and you might find it quicker to look at these for an overview. However if graphs and statistics are confusing, focus on the explanations around them.
The methods section covers what kind of research was carried out and how it was conducted.
Consider the following questions:
The methods section should be detailed enough for someone to replicate the research and help you determine the robustness of the research approach.
Make sure you review the references (usually at the end of the article).
The references section is a list of the sources (articles, books, conference proceedings) used by the author/s.
The list of references, or works cited, should include all of the materials the authors used in the article. The references list can be a good way to identify further reading and additional relevant research on the topic