Video Transcripts : What are the different types of articles? (And how do I recognize them?)

For both the empirical and theoretical articles, you'll need them to be peer reviewed. Peer review is a process in which an article submitted to a journal for publication is reviewed and critiqued by other subject matter experts who decide if the article is worthy of publication. It's a form of quality control. 

The first and easiest step is to make sure the journal in which the article was published is a peer reviewed journal. You can do this by using a database called UlrichsWeb. You can find UlrichsWeb from the databases A-Z list on the library. 

Empirical research and theoretical articles are just two types of peer reviewed articles. Peer reviewed journals also publish literature reviews, program descriptions, and opinion papers. Since you might encounter any of these types of articles in your searches, we'll go through them one by one to describe not only what they are, but also show you how to recognize the ones you can use for your annotated bibliography.

Empirical research articles focus on primary research, which can be gathered through observations or experiments. Empirical research articles are not merely a synthesis of previous research or a purely theoretical article. Theoretical articles, on the other hand, draw upon existing research to create a new theory, revise an existing theory, or explore theory in new ways.

Theoretical articles tend to synthesize ideas into a concept or model that identifies key components and how they're related to each other. These articles are not conducting original quantitative and qualitative research.

Literature reviews summarize and critique other articles or studies on a given topic. These articles are not conducting original qualitative and quantitative research and cannot be used as a source for your annotated bibliography. However, you can often check their list of references to track down the studies they critiqued, which may be empirical. 

Opinion papers are fairly self-explanatory. They provide the author's opinions on a topic based on their own perspective and experiences. You may see these published in a special issue of a journal focused around a particular theme. Again, they are not conducting original research and cannot be used for your annotated bibliography.

Finally, you might encounter program prescriptions. Again, these are what they sound like the description of a program or initiative from an individual involved in implementing it. You tend to see these more from magazines or non peer reviewed publications, but you will sometimes see them in peer reviewed journals too. Again, they're not conducting original research and cannot be used as a source in your annotated bibliography assignment. 

When you start doing your research, you'll need to be able to determine if the article you have located is a peer reviewed empirical article. There are a few clues you can look for to help you decide if your article passes the peer reviewed check we discussed earlier in this tutorial. You'll then need to evaluate it to make sure it's empirical.

Start with the article's abstract. This is a brief summary of the article and will often include information about what or who the author studied their data, sources or participants. Look for some of these key words in the abstract as indicators that research was conducted. Words like survey, focus group, case study, experiment, correlation, ethnography, structured interview, observations, narrative research, participants, or meta analysis can all indicate that you have found a research or empirical research article.

Research articles also typically have key sections like the ones outlined here. Look for a literature review, a methods section, results, discussion and conclusion. Research articles will always include a list of references as well. Some articles may combine a few of these sections or label them slightly differently, but these are some general headings to watch out for.

Finally check the methods or methodology section. This section will explain the research questions, the study sample, and how the data was collected. If you don't see a methods section, you probably have not found an empirical research article.

The other type of article you need to find is a theoretical one. Again, your first step should be to determine if the article is peer reviewed. After that, check the article's abstract. This brief summary of the article will often indicate what model, framework or concept the article is exploring. You shouldn't see information here about data sources or participants as theoretical articles aren't conducting empirical research. Here are a few words to look out for in an article's abstract to give a clue that it might be a theoretical article, Framework, concept or conceptual, model, theory and theoretical foundation are all good clues that you found a theoretical article.

Finally, check for a methods section. Most theoretical articles won't have one. If you do see one, it should look quite different from the methods section, from the empirical sources. Rather than pointing out the data or study participants it will mention how the conceptual model or framework was created or analyzed.

As I mentioned before, you might encounter other types of articles in your search, and it's important to be able to recognize those too, so you don't use them for your annotated bibliography. A common one is the literature review or review article. In many literature reviews you'll see a review or literature review mentioned right in the article title. If it isn't mentioned in the title, check the abstract.

You'll see things like narrative, literature review, literature review, systematic literature review mentioned here. These are all indications that you have identified a literature review article and cannot use it as a source for your assignment. If you still can't tell from the abstract, look at the methods section here. The article might outline how the search was conducted. Again, this will look significantly different from an empirical article because it's not mentioning any aspects of a research study just how the articles were located and selected.

A less common type of article you could encounter is an opinion paper. You can generally tell from the abstract that you have located an opinion paper. It won't mention sources of data and will generally make it clear that is one person's perspective on the issue. Opinion pieces are often invited by the journal publishers and may or may not have been peer reviewed.

Finally, you might sometimes encounter a program description. These articles will not have a methods section because no research is being conducted and they tend to appear more often in magazines or trade publications. Sometimes these types of publications slip into your search results, so it's always a good idea to double check the publication name in Ulrichsweb.

As you can see from this one, if I wasn't sure from the abstract, clicking on the full text takes me to a short, glossy article that looks quite different from the scholarly sources we've been looking at so far. It indicates that this piece doesn't meet that peer reviewed or empirical theoretical criteria for the bibliography assignment. 

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