Most scholarly articles in Psychology and Sociology fall under two categories:
For this assignment, you are writing the Research Review. The articles you choose should be Research Reports or Articles. Research Reports follow a specific pattern and are organized into 6 sections:
For an interactive tour of a scholarly article, see North Carolina State University's "Anatomy of a Scholarly Article".
An abstract is included in most academic journal articles. The abstract is a summary of the article or study. Typically, they contain 100 words or less and are organized exactly like the experimental report: introduction, literature review, methods, results and discussion.
If you only see an abstract, you do not have access to the full text of the article. To find the full text of an article you are looking for, ask a librarian.
The Introduction section follow a general to specific pattern: first introducing the problem in a general description, then a short overview of the study, including the hypothesis. Introductions will typically include:
The Methods section will be organized in three parts:
The Results section is where the author(s) present the results of their research. You may see the Results and Discussion sections combined in some articles. Results can include:
In the Discussion section, the author(s) will talk about what the results mean to the topic or subject. This section moves from specific to general. Here, you may find:
The References list includes any sources cited or referred to in the paper. Typically, Psychology and Sociology studies will be in APA format. Remember that any articles you select for this assignment must have a minimum of 20 references. If you select the correct type of articles, this will be an easy task. Most academic articles will have more than 20 references.
This information was summarized and paraphrased from Purdue OWL's Writing the Experimental Report.