In college humanities courses, the vast majority of reading assignments involve reading academic articles. Despite their prevalence, few professors take the time to explain their significance within the academy – or how to critically engage with them.
This short primer is thus aimed at introducing incoming college freshmen to the analytical process of comprehending and critiquing academic literature.
1. Read the title page
This is a critical source of fantastically useful information. I’ll use the example below – the title page of an academic article by the esteemed scholar Joan Wallach Scott – to walk you through each piece of information included.
Title
The title of an academic article often contains implicit, if not explicit, reference to its argument. In this case, Scott was part of a wave of 1980s feminist scholars arguing that gender should be considered in historical analysis.
Author
It’s always a wonderful idea to Google the author of an academic article before reading it. A quick search will give you a good idea of who the author is, and where they’re coming from: was this written by a German scholar of the 19th century with a (very!) long Wikipedia page? Was this written by a current UC Davis professor actively producing groundbreaking research on gender and the law? What academic field is this author in, and what does that reveal about their research methodology?
Note also that academic authors often produce public-facing work for newspapers, magazines, or YouTube channels. Work in such media is intended to be accessible to people outside of academia, and is much easier to understand. If you’re struggling to understand an author’s core argument or academic jargon, it’s always a phenomenal idea to turn to those public-facing resources! Has this author produced an op-ed recently? Have they been featured on a YouTube channel aimed at academic accessibility, such as Big Think? Have any of their public lectures been recorded? If the author is working today, there’s a significant chance they’ve done some form of accessible, public-facing work; take advantage of that incredible resource!
Source
This is the academic journal in which the article was published. In this case, Scott published in The American Historical Review, which is the most prestigious historical journal in academia. It is published four times per year by Oxford University Press, and includes approximately 25 history articles on a wide array of topics in each publication. This particular article was published in December of 1986, and takes up pages 1053-1075 of the journal!
Note that in addition to teaching your classes, all professors are expected to regularly publish academic books and articles. Professors advance their careers (and achieve tenure, lifetime job security) by publishing innovative research with relative frequency. Before publication, academic articles are reviewed by journals’ editors as well as specialists who work in the same field as the author. As such, any published academic article you’re reading has been reviewed and vetted by several additional scholars in the field.
URL
This article was downloaded from JSTOR (https://www.jstor.org/), which is where you’ll find almost all of the academic articles you read! JSTOR is short for journal storage, and is a digital library of academic journals, books, and primary sources. Your university pays a subscription fee for you to be able to access JSTOR, and you should take advantage of this phenomenal resource! If you’re writing a research paper or simply curious as to what academics have already published on a topic, JSTOR is the first place to turn.
2. Read the conclusion!
It sounds counterintuitive, but articles’ conclusions are truly gold mines. Think about it, when writing your own paper’s conclusions, what do your teachers instruct you to do? “Summarize your argument, then talk about why it matters in a broader context.” In short, conclusions are where you reiterate your argument and then justify the “so what?” Academics take the same approach to writing their conclusions. Their conclusion will first briefly summarize their broader argument, and then justify why their research in the area matters. Reading the conclusion is the fastest way to find the paper’s argument summarized in neat and succinct language. Start with the conclusion, and you’ll start with a critical understanding of a paper’s core argument.
Note that most academic articles have an explicit subheading called the conclusion. Some do not, in which case the conclusion can generally be found in the paper’s final two to three pages.
3. Read the introduction.
The introduction provides key historical context for the paper’s argument, as well as a very helpful definition of terms (if terms are not clearly defined, feel free to critique the paper on that basis – academics often do!). While it is still aimed at an academic audience (graduate students and professors write academic journal articles for other graduate students and professors to read), the introduction should provide a cursory overview of the main context a reader will need to fully appreciate the author’s argument.
4. Skim the body of the article.
Most academic articles are roughly thirty pages, and your typical college humanities class will give you three to seven academic articles or book chapters to read every class! This can total about 250 pages of reading per class each week. Importantly, your professors do not expect you to read every single word – skimming is a vital skill to learn and employ in college! After reading the title page, introduction, and conclusion thoroughly, skim through the rest of the academic article: read the first and last sentences of most paragraphs, paying special attention to the mini-introductions and conclusions under each subheading. Subheadings are a tremendously useful road map for an article; use them to guide you through your skim!
5. Write down at least two questions and three critiques you plan to raise in class discussion.
Especially if you get nervous speaking in class, this will make it much easier to participate!
Questions
Did you find any parts of the article confusing, or difficult to understand? Chances are, your classmates did too! Write down those clarification questions and raise them in class. The best clarification questions are simple: you can ask about the definition of a specific word or background on a source the author used.
Critiques
Learning to engage critically with academic work is an important part of conducting college-level writing and research. The following are common ways to engage critically with academic texts.
- Who is this author arguing with? Academics will often name the specific scholars that they agree or disagree with in their literature review, in which they analyze existing research on the topic. Do you agree with their criticism or dismissal of other perspectives, or are there perspectives this author critiqued that you might actually agree with?
- What source base is this author using? Is the author drawing on an archive, oral history interviews, ethnographic research, or another research methodology? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the type of sources the author is using to engage their research question? Here, it is a wonderful idea to take a look at the footnotes, as they will give you a sense of what other academics and primary sources the author is in conversation with.
- How did the author engage theory? As my Harvard Law School professor defined it, “academic theory is something that should make a topic easier to frame or understand.” If there was academic theory in this article, did it make it easier to frame or understand the topic the author was writing about? Or did it feel a bit out of place?
6. Congratulations!
You've done a fantastic job reading your first academic article. With those questions and critiques prepped and written down, you'll do a phenomenal job in your next discussion section.
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