Writing Summaries of Research Articles
One of the important goals in any research class is to give you some experience reading published peer reviewed journal articles. Article summaries are our mechanism for accomplishing that goal. Reading the original journal articles is important for a number of reasons.
± First, only the original journal article will usually contain enough detail for you to fully evaluate the validity of the study.
± Second, other people’s descriptions of someone’s research (i.e. secondary sources) may contain errors and if you don’t read the primary sources you may pass on those errors.
± Third, reading high quality published research can give you ideas for your own studies.
± Fourth, reading quality published research will provide you with a model for your own scientific writing.
± Fifth, the articles you summarize may be helpful to you in some other writing projects in the class (e.g. end of semester project).
There is no substitute for reading the original high quality journal articles. Take the article summaries seriously, because we will when grading them.
For each article summary you do over the course of the semester you will reading an article that reports new empirical research (rather than merely summarizing past research). Reading a research article is not like reading Time Magazine. It takes careful, thoughtful, methodical reading skills and will likely take you considerable time, especially at first. As you get more experience doing it you will find it easier and easier to do. However, you cannot expect to breeze through these types of articles, or do them at the last minute, and understand them in any depth.
The types of articles you are going to be reading are psychology research reports. A typical psychology research report that you read will include these elements:
(1) A title, authors and affiliations of authors
(2) An abstract, which is kind of a summary of the article
(3) An introduction, which introduces the past research on the topic and describes the purpose of the study that was conducted
(4) One or more experiments (or other kinds of empirical studies)
a. Methods
b. Results (or Results and Discussion in a multiple experiment study)
(5) General discussion
(6) References
(7) Appendixes or other end-matter, all of which is optional.
The article summaries you write will discuss and evaluate all the major elements of the research article.
Article summaries must be written in your own words. If you merely copy the words of the authors you are committing plagiarism. Your article summaries will require you to describe in your own words what the article was about and to evaluate the article. Your article summaries should be typed, single spaced, in a readable 12 point font. Each article summary should address the following issues in the following order. Please label each section. Failure to clearly label each section will result in a lower grade.
(1) First, list the citation details for the article. The citation should be listed in APA style.
(2) In their introduction, the authors will describe previous research. In your summary indicate the main findings of that previous research.
(3) In their introduction, the authors will also describe the purpose of the experiments they conducted and how it relates to the previous research. In your summary you should answer the following questions: What is the purpose of the research the authors conducted, what question were they trying to answer, or what hypotheses were they trying to prove?
(4) The authors will report one or more experiment that they conducted. For every experiment they describe provide the following information:
(5) In the General Discussion they will tell you the implications of what they found in their experiment(s). Describe the implications of the study. What is the take home message of the article?
(6) Evaluate the study you are summarizing. What was valuable about the research reported in the article? What limitations were there in the research reported in the article? Keep in mind that I want you to comment on the substance of the article not the writing style. One way of thinking about evaluation is in terms of the three kinds of validity we discussed in class (Internal, External, Construct).
(7) Indicate what follow up studies you think should be conducted? This is a chance for you to demonstrate some originality. If you were going to conduct a follow up experiment based on the research you’re summarizing what would that follow up research be?
(8) Include a photocopy or print out of the article
Normally you will be able to cover all of these points in 1-2 single spaced pages.
Your article summaries will be graded using a three point scale. My expectation is that you will address all of above points adequately in your summaries.
3 means that you did a reasonable job answering all of the questions.
2 means that you made a reasonable effort but that some aspects of the summary were not adequate or were unclear.
1 means that the summary is substantially inadequate in major ways.
0 you will get a zero if you do not turn the summary in
Your end of the semester article summary grade will be the percentage of points you received out of all the possible points.