What are Article Reviews?
An Article Review is an essay that analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of a particular piece of research. It requires students to carefully read and critique a professional article and provide a summary of their analysis on the material.
General Organization of an Article Review
- First section should be devoted to explaining the basic idea of the study.
- Second section should be an analysis of the usefulness of the study, showcasing knowledge of the ramifications of the study and results, as well as the drawbacks and weaknesses of the study.
- A full APA citation of the relevant article is required immediately after the APA style heading.
Here is a small excerpt from a student’s article review to get an idea of what they look like:
“The methodology of this study is fairly sound. In order to recruit participants, the researchers contacted 5 different adoption agencies that were in places that allowed adoption by homosexual parents, and had placed children with homosexual couples before. Using the files provided by the agencies, the researchers contacted all the couples with children between the ages of 1 and 5. This recruitment method differed from previous studies which had selected participants non-systematically at gay and lesbian groups. The sample was fairly homogenous as far as socio-economic status and education. Although the researchers made an effort to recruit from 5 different locations, they were still limited to states where adoption into homosexual families is legal. However, heterosexual couples were recruited from the same area, so comparison between the groups in this aspect is still possible. One important limitation of this sample is the age of the children being studied. It seems like it would be difficult to draw accurate conclusions about the formation of gender identity and adjustment for children as young as one or two. It was not made clear why the researchers chose to focus on this particular group.
This study used a variety of measures that seemed to be validated for homosexual and heterosexual parents. All three of these scales had moderate to high alphas, indicating reliability, for homosexual and heterosexual parents. All measures used in regards to the children were age appropriate and had moderate to high reliability and validity.”