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Informative Essay

This guide is intended for students who are exploring a subject with the goal to explain it to others.

Understanding Scholarly Research

Scholarly Research as a Conversation

Engaging with scholarly research can sometimes feel overwhelming or intimidating for students especially when you've never done it before. For this reason, it can be helpful to use an analogy when considering the function and format of scholarly sources. 

The video below explores the idea of scholarly research as a conversation and includes strategies for how to find, understand, and enter into the scholarly conversation on your topic.

 

 

Searching an Academic Database

Using Academic Search Complete

An academic database, like the ones available through the DVC library, contains thousands of articles from a wide variety of academic or scholarly journals. 

Below is a video that demonstrates how to access the library database, Academic Search Complete and includes how to:

  • Apply publication date, source type, and subject filters
  • Access the record for an academic journal article
  • Access and download a PDF of the full-text article from the database

 

What is Peer Review

Reading an Academic Journal Article

Reading an Academic Journal Article

Academic journal articles tend to be quite long and full of dense, discipline-specific language. 

Once you have explored things like the article's title and abstract and are interested in examining the article itself, there is a method  that you likely want to use to read through the article. 

The video below shows you how to read through an academic journal article in a way that will maximize your time and your research efforts.