 In her organizational leadership classes, Mary was often required to use research articles. The first time she was asked to find a research article, she was a little confused. Was a research article the same as a scholarly article? If she found an article in a database, did that mean it was a research article? Mary's professors explained that scholarly journals publish many different types of articles, and not all of them are research articles. When she searches in a database, not all of the articles she finds will be research articles. In fact, not all of them will be scholarly articles, since many databases also have news or magazine articles as well. Research articles are those that report the findings of an original research study or experiment. Some research articles describe quantitative research, some describe qualitative research, and some describe mixed methods research. Another type of article often found in the scholarly journal is known as a literature review. In a literature review, the author does not conduct their own research experiment. Instead, the author reviews articles written by others and summarizes their findings. While literature reviews are published in scholarly journals, they are not usually considered research articles. Along with research articles and literature reviews, Mary learned that scholarly journals publish other types of articles, such as news articles, book reviews, and commentaries or letters to the editor. Although published in scholarly journals, book reviews, editorials, commentaries, reflections, or other similar articles are not considered to be scholarly articles. These articles do not describe the results of her original research study, and they have not been through the peer review process. At first, Mary had difficulty determining the type of article she had found. However, she learned to carefully read the abstract for the article, as this often described the type of article she had discovered. She also realized that research articles often have specific formats, with clearly labeled sections such as methods, results, and discussion. Mary also realized she could enter search terms that would describe the type of article she wanted. For example, in addition to her specific search term, she would type in quantitative or qualitative to limit her results to certain types of articles. Learning about the different kinds of articles in scholarly journals made it easier for Mary to always find a specific kind of article she needed.