Tarja Moles
Academic journals are great resources when you have already done your basic research and want to go deeper. Indeed, there are a number of factors that make journal articles worth exploring: they have a very specific focus and contain highly specialised information; they tend to convey the latest research findings; and they’re more likely to be of high quality as they’re written by experts whose work is peerreviewed (ie evaluated by specialists) prior to publication.
Having said this, journals are not the easiest type of publications to study. Academic articles cannot be read like you would read a news item or a short story. In contrast, they’re built around a key argument (ie a claim or a line of reasoning) and structured accordingly. To support the argument, the author shows what the logical reasoning behind his/her claim is. Depending on the article’s subject matter and perspective, the key argument can be built on evidence, theory or both.