Library staff is available to help with your questions big or small. You can find research assistance in the Learning and Research Center of the Forrer Learning Commons or you can schedule a Research Consultation!
Virtual Assistance is available via
Phone: 540-828-5642
Email: research@bridgewater.edu
Text: 540-318-1962
Gathering information from a scholarly article is different from reading a popular article. Most of the time you do not need to read a scholarly article from start to finish in order to understand what it's about.
On your first reading of the article, you just need to be concerned with whether the article contains information useful for your research. To do this, you should focus on the following:
There maybe other parts of the article too, like a Methods or Results section. You will focus on those in later readings. You should read through an article more than once before before using it in your own research.
Reading through an article once allows you to understand the main ideas of the article. The second or third readings of the article should be in more detail, and are typically from start to finish. They will allow you to pull more details from the article and identify specific elements you'll use later to support your own paper or project. During these readings you should concentrate on the following questions: