What Should You Include in An Article/Journal Critique?

From time to time, you may be asked to critique a research article from a given online Journal. What can you do in such cases?

Well, here is quick overview of what you should focus on:

Part I: Article Identification

The full citation of the article (in APA/MLA/Harvard format) should be listed first.

Part II: What was found

This section should contain the following information:

• The rationale behind the study (the broad area that was being studied)

• The objective of the study (what did the researchers set out to find?)

• The method(s) used in the study

• The findings of the study

• The authors’ conclusions

Part III: Your response

This section should address the following issues:

• Was the paper well-written or was it difficult to follow? Note that stating that the paper was hard to follow because of vocabulary is not a valid response for this part. If you do not understand a word or term it is up you to rectify the situation.

• What were pros and cons of the research method(s) that was/were used?

• How could the method(s) have been improved?

• What problems do you see with the obtained results? Are there confounding variables or other issues that weren’t taken into account when the study was designed?

• Do you agree or disagree with the authors’ conclusions based on their results?

• What questions remain unanswered?

• Could these aforementioned questions have been answered in this study with a better research design?

• What research logically follows from the current study (What is the “next step”) ?

That is it, folks!

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