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LIB 111: Academic Writing & Research: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics in Nursing

1. Peer-Reviewed Source

While not every scholarly article is peer-reviewed, peer-reviewed articles can usually be considered scholarly. If you see information like this in your article, telling you when it was submitted, when it was revised, and when it was accepted, that is a big hint that this has indeed been peer-reviewed.

Also, while it's not useful for determining if something is scholarly or not, for medical/science/technology topics, the date an article is from (sometimes called the currency), can help determine if it's credible. Since these fields have constantly updated research and findings, a recent article is more likely to contain credible, correct information than something from even 10 years ago.

2. DOI

A DOI is a type of permalink that academic articles may have. You should be able to go to doi.org, type in the number that's highlighted here, and be brought to where the full text lives online (though that doesn't mean the full text will always be available freely).

3. Authors

An article is more likely to be scholarly if it has multiple authors, but this should not be the only thing you pay attention to - it is VERY possible for a scholarly article to have just one author.

Instead, this is highlighted because this also tells us a little more about who these authors are, including their degrees and what institutions they are associated with. You want to make sure the authors' backgrounds and experience matches what they are writing about. Why are they qualified to be writing about this topic?

4. Abstract

A scholarly article is more likely to have an abstract than something like a newspaper or magazine article. Why? Because scholarly articles are often much longer, so this helps you know if the article will be useful to you before you commit to reading 10+ pages!

5. Journal Title

The title of the journal this article is in will usually be listed at the very top or very bottom of the article. Often an academic journal will simply be called a "Journal of. . ." something, but not always.
How can we tell if this is peer-reviewed? If we're simply looking at an article, there is no guaranteed way we can tell by the title alone. Try Googling Nursing Philosophy journal peer-reviewed and see what comes up!

6. In-Text Citations

Notice that there are parenthetical citations all throughout this article. If you scroll to the end, you will see all of these references listed in a bibliography.

7. Language

Scholarly articles are meant to be read by people who already know the basics about a topic - whether that's other scholars, researchers, students, or people who work in the field. You will often see specialized language that might be difficult for someone who is new to the topic to fully understand. As a student, that's okay! Reading academic articles, like research itself, is also a skill, and something you will gain practice doing during your time at MCPHS.

8. Purpose

Another important distinction of a credible scholarly article is that it should be free from bias. The authors should be sharing the information they've discovered with minimal intrusion of personal, political, or other opinions. In this conclusion section, the authors argue both for and against existing guidelines, but do so in a balanced way, and the rest of their article backs up their opinions with copious evidence - not just strong emotions.

9. References

A scholarly article will always have a reference section at the end of the paper (sometimes called References, or Works Cited, or a Bibliography). This allows the reader to see what the authors are basing their research and their information off of, and if you read anything in the article that's particularly interesting, you can find the original source of that information and even track down the original article to learn more.

Example: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics in Nursing

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