Scholarly or peer-reviewed articles are written by experts for other experts. They can be about current research projects or reviews of multiple research papers on a certain topic. Read scholarly articles in this order:
Gives you a very brief overview of the whole paper. It's at the beginning of the paper, usually just below the authors' names. It may be labeled abstract, summary or highlights.
Gives you the new information the author(s) learned and ties it together to the work of other researchers in the field. This section usually has many citations to other articles. It's the section at the end of the paper, just before the references.
If after reading the above parts, you feel that the article is not useful for you, stop and look for other papers. If you do feel that the paper has information you can use, read the entire article.
eBooks are an excellent way to find background and overview information for research. Use the following tutorial to learn how to divide and conquer eBook sections and how to search within an eBook for keywords.
