OBSOLETE – What is a scholarly article?

Scientists publish scientific articles to show new research results.

A scholarly article should fulfill several requirements:

Research results that are presented should give new insight into a subject.
The results must be verifiable, so that they may be used in further research.
The scholarly article must be read, assessed and approved by the author’s peers before it is published. This is called peer review.
The scholarly article must always contain citations and correct bibliography.
New knowledge is built on existing knowledge, and a scholarly article will always cite the previous research it is built on. This is done by citations and bibliographies.
A scholarly article is most often published in a scholarly journal, published by a publishing house or an organization, but it may also be published in a scholarly anthology (a collection of articles with an editor).
A scholarly article should be written in a language that many understand.

How to check your sources:

The scholarly article must be peer-reviewed. On the publisher’s website, you can find out if a journal has been peer-reviewed. Here is an example of the journal Nature and of Nordic cultural policy journal.
A scholarly article should be written in a language that many understand. If the article is of international interest, it is often written in English.
Always check that the bibliography is easy to follow and correct. The references should be given in such a way that you easily can retrieve the given sources. Here you will find examples of how references should be given.
A scholarly article is structured and organized. It has good illustrations and clear figure texts and tables with text where necessary. Scholarly articles are often built on the IMRAD structure: Introduction, Method, Result, and Discussion.
A scholarly article always has a good abstract that provides a description of the article’s content. The abstract is given at the top of the article, often in smaller font size.
It must be clear where the article has been published. In what book or journal is the article found, and where in the publication? Note that the pages must be numbered.
Modern articles should have a DOI (Direct Object Identifier). A DOI is used to locate an article online.
It might be a good idea to consider how you located the article. Do you trust the webpage where the article was published? There are a number of journals that are published by questionable publishers. Read more here. Did you use a search engine like Google/Bing? If yes, you should check it thoroughly.
Academic libraries’ webpages are good portals to high-quality information. You can also trust recommendations from your supervisor, or a referral from another peer-reviewed article.

Does the article follow the standard research design?

Scholarly articles are often built around the IMRAD structure: Introduction, Method, Result And Discussion

A Scholarly article should have:

information about which journal the article has been published in
clear title
information about who the author is
a good abstract
description of methodology
description of results
good discussion
clear figures and tables with text
conclusion
citations and bibliography
good, objective language
clear page numbers

Considering non-scholarly articles

Journal articles published outside the academic realm may also contain scientific information and news. These articles tend to be of a popular science style, and written to reach a wide range of readers. Hence, they are not as detailed and well-documented. Examples of this are journals like Geo, Sykepleien, Fontene, and similar. Such articles should be assessed with other criteria than a scholarly article.

Check:

Is the source a balanced and objective account of the topic, or is it biased?
Are there any conflicts of interest?
Does the content challenge or confirm information you already have?
Are the arguments and reasoning reasonable and structured?

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