The most common types of articles that you will be using are research articles and review articles. The main difference between the two is the purpose of each article:
• Research articles (also called primary articles) are written by someone (or a group) who did an experiment and they are reporting on how the experiment was done and what the results were (generating new knowledge).
• Review articles (also called a secondary articles) are normally written by someone (or a group) who did not perform an experiment but are, instead, reporting on the similarities or differences among a group of experiments that were done by others (compiling what is known, but not reporting on the results of a single experiment that the author(s) conducted.
Note: There are many kinds of other articles in scholarly journals (book reviews, letters to the editor, short communications, etc.). You will need to make sure that you are using either a research article or a review article.
The following are characteristics of research and review articles. They are general characteristics and only point toward one type of article or the other, but can't, by themselves, tell you if you are looking at one type of article or the other.
| Research (primary) articles |
Review (secondary) articles |
| • Long title with a lot of technical jargon |
• Short, easy to understand title |
| • Many authors |
• One to four authors |
| • Written in first person narrative ("I assembled the apparatus...", "We performed a ...", or "Our lab discovered ...") |
• Written in third person narrative ("Smith assembled the apparatus...", "They performed a ...", or "Takahasi and Suzuki discovered ...") |
| • Sections: literature review, materials and methods, results, discussion, references |
• Sections: typically a literature review and references. If a methods section is included, it usually details how articles were chosen for inclusion. |
| • A lot of tables, figures, or other graphical representation of data |
• Fewer tables, figures, or other graphical representation of data |
| • Many references |
• Many references |
