1.6 Reading, understanding and writing up non-empirical articles

SOWK 621: DeCarlo

Reading and Outlining a Non-empirical Journal Article

Explanation

For this course you will have to read a lot of academic journal articles.  The goal of this exercise is to build skills on how to extract the information you need from each article you come across as efficiently as possible.  This assignment is designed for you to explore in greater detail aspects of the Human Service field that are interesting to you.  After conducting a literature search using an academic database (Google Scholar, Academic Search Complete, PubMed, PSYCinfo), choose one article that you find interesting and want to read. 

Non-empirical articles do not have a specific structure like empirical articles.  Instead, authors organize their articles by topic and subtopic.  Non-empirical articles include articles about social theory, history, philosophy, and literature reviews. 

Go to the Penn State Fayette Library page and search for a Non-empircal journal article. If you need assistance review the following links

• Find Box and Searching
• Fayette Library Homepage
• University Libraries Homepage, My Account, Ask a Librarian
• LibGuides
• Databases
• Using the Catalog or click on University Libraries which have some helpful tutorials

Please create a Word document and submit the following to D2L.

1. Choose a peer-reviewed journal article that will likely be a part of your research proposal.
   1. Write out the citation to the article in APA format.  (Google Scholar will give you a citation that is correct about 80% of the time, you should double-check it.)
2. Fill in the following sections by typing or copy/pasting.  (Copying directly tends to save a lot of time, in my experience.)
   1. General Idea:
3. 1-2 sentence summary of the article.
   1. Facts from the Literature
4. In the Introduction and Discussion sections, authors will provide an interpretation of the existing literature on a topic.  Copy anything you think might be useful in your research paper
   1. (I usually copy the sentence that the author writes with the internal citation at the end so I remember what the original source is.)
   2. Example: 73 people per year are killed by wombats (Ambrose, 1992).
   3. Facts from the author
5. While non-empirical articles don’t involve analyzing new empirical data, the author may make novel or interesting points.  These may have to do with theory, philosophy, ethics, etc.
   1. Sources of Interest:
6. From the references, copy all of the citations for any articles you included in the Facts from Other Sources section or that you might find useful in your paper.
7. Answer the following questions:
   1. Why would someone seek out this source?  What questions would they try to answer?
   2. How does this resource build upon, challenge, or relate to other literature on the topic?
   3. Why do you think this is a reputable source from a competent and trustworthy author?

NOTE: In the future, I will refer to these notes as a “Raw Outline.”