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These articles are good both for finding recent information on a topic (what has happened in the last week or month) as well as finding out how historical events were reported in the past (for example, how was the AIDS crisis first reported in the 1980s?)
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Popular MagazinesThese articles are good for summarizing information on a topic for the general public. They often provide a background, summarize research findings, and provide some analysis of a topic.
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*Sometimes called Professional Journals or Industry Journals
These articles are good to keep people in a particular field of work or trade (veterinarians, police officers, hotel managers, teachers, librarians, advertisers...etc.) up-to-date on trends in their line of work. Articles often summarize and analyze findings from scholarly research.
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*Sometimes called Scholarly, Academic, Peer-reviewed or Refereed
These articles are good to find results of scientific or academic research. They are written for scholars and provide in-depth analysis of a very specific area of your topic
Images: All images in this tabbed box were taken by GRC librarians
PT scholarly journal articles are based on different types of research studies that may include randomized controlled trials, non-experimental studies (cohort, case control, case studies) and qualitative studies.
Two of the most authoritative types of studies are:
Example:
A systematic review is a comprehensive literature search on a topic in which all of the primary studies of the highest level of evidence have been systematically identified, appraised and then summarized according to an explicit and reproducible methodology.
Systematic Reviews are a gold standard for types of research studies and offer the highest level appraised evidence to answer clinical questions on a topic. In general a good systematic review will be a better guide to practice than an individual research article. Try first to find systematic reviews on your topic. If you are unable to locate them, then you can search for lower levels of non-appraised evidence (randomized controlled trials, case-control, correlational, or cohort studies, or qualitative studies)
Example:
Meta-Analysis: A systematic review (comprehensive literature search on studies on a particular topic) that quantitatively combines the results of several studies using accepted statistical methodology in order to produce a larger sample size and draw stronger conclusions about the topic.
Meta-Analyses are a gold standard for types of research studies and offer the highest level appraised evidence to answer clinical questions on a topic. In general a good meta-analysis will be a better guide to practice than an individual research article. Try first to find either meta-analyses or systematic reviews on your topic. If you are unable to locate them, then you can search for lower levels of non-appraised evidence (randomized controlled trials, case-control, correlational, or cohort studies, or qualitative studies)
1. Click to open each of these three publications:a) APPEARANCE - scrolling through each article, what visual differences jump out at you? At a quick glance, how does each simply "look" different?
b) CONTENT - what do you notice about article length, depth, vocabulary, subject matter?
c) AUTHORITY - can you find the author's qualifications? What are they? Do you trust them? Why?
d) AUDIENCE/PURPOSE - Who is this being published for? What led you to that conclusion?