 You've probably already heard about scholarly articles, but here's a quick review. A scholarly article is an article written by scholars on a subject for other scholars in order to communicate something new. What makes this special is the peer review process. Before publishing, a group of experts gets together and reads an article draft, looking at it critically for sound research methods and clear ideas. Why are they important? Scholarly peer reviewed articles share with us high quality research and information about a topic. Scholarly articles are integral to solving some of the world's problems through medical research, engineering marvels, scientific breakthroughs. How do we know we can trust these so-called scholars? Every scholarly article should include the credentials of the authors, what institutions they represent, if they have a higher degree of education, that sort of thing. The more highly regarded the university they are from, the more significant the work is thought to be. For example, Johns Hopkins University is highly regarded for medical research, so they would be renowned for medical research over somebody else. In this example, you can see the authors' affiliations and you can decide how credible they are as scholars. So what makes these articles scientific? Scientific publications are different in that they use the scientific method and are used to progress science. For example, if I were trying to develop a cure for Alzheimer's disease, I would want to examine all the research done previously and push it one step further. Therefore, scientific publications meet detailed methods that you could replicate to get the same results. Here's an example of a scientific scholarly article. You can see what journal it's from, the abstract, the authors, and part of the introduction. Many articles about science will always contain the following sections. The abstract, introduction, methods and materials, results, discussion, and references. The abstract is a summary of the article's contents. It's the paragraph you read to determine the article's relevance to your research. The introduction shares the background information, why the scholars thought this research was important, other research on the topic, and why you should think it's important. The methods and materials let us know how the researchers perform their experiments. This section is detailed and specific so that replication is possible. The results tell us exactly that. The results about what happened during the experiment. The discussion section tells us the implications of the study and further actions. Finally, the references share the resources used for doing the research. Here we can see what other articles were used to develop the one we're reading. If you're interested in a topic, this is a great place to explore similar research. Scholarly scientific articles are so important because they create and develop conversations among a community of scholars. Articles can often be traced back to other articles, and those articles can be traced back to others, and so on and so on. This goes on for years. Each publication offers a new insight, and as this conversation continues, exciting ideas and breakthroughs emerge. Questions? Need help finding a scholarly article? Visit us at the reference desk? Email us? Give us a call during library hours? Or chat with a librarian online 24-7. Thank you, and enjoy your research.