NRS 104: Nursing Professionalism and Practice: Identifying Scholarly Articles

How do you know if you've found a scholarly article?

Even in CINAHL, you may not be looking at a scholarly article. Use this list to help you distinguish between scholarly and popular publications.

Article Title: If the title of the article is short and catchy, it may be a popular article. Many titles of scholarly articles are long and precise.

Subjects: Have the database librarians assigned subject terms related to methodology? Then the article is likely to be scholarly.

Article Headings: A scholarly article is often separated into sections such as Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion, Conclusion, that are indicated by headings.

Author Affiliation: Scholarly articles are written by practitioners, theorists, and educators.

Article Length: Scholarly articles are generally longer than popular articles

Reference List: Look for a list of works cited and/or numbered footnotes or endnotes. Citations are not merely a check against plagiarism. They set the article in the context of a scholarly discussion and provide useful suggestions for further research.

Audience: Who is this article written for? If it seems to be for the general public then it’s probably not scholarly. But if it seems like the intended audience is professional and researchers, it may be scholarly.