How to Write a Critical Review of An Empirical Article Text

Jonathan Friesen - Writing Coach

How to write an article review writing an article review, which is also sometimes referred to as an article critique, is a special type of writing that involves reading an article and then providing the reader with your personal take on its content. In general, article review essays should start with a heading that includes a citation of the sources that are being reviewed. The first paragraph, which is the introduction to the article review, should provide a summary of the article highlights. This summary should not provide every last detail about the article being reviewed. If you find yourself carrying on or needing more than one paragraph to write your summary, you need to revisit the paragraph and find ways to trim down the length of your summary. Following the brief summary of your article, you will then need to explain why the article is significant. Some questions you should ask yourself in order to come up with your personal evaluation include whether or not the article is well written and clear.

You should also consider whether or not any information was missing and if more research is needed on the topic. If you are writing the article review for a class, try to connect the article to organizational and industrial experience and try to connect the content of the article to information that you have been studying in your course. As you write your article review, keep in mind that you are doing more than just a book report. Rather than focus on telling what the article was about, your article review should reflect your personal opinions on the article as well as how it affects you or the field in which it was written. After you have finished writing your article review, be sure to go back and re read it. This way, you will be able to look at it with a fresh set of eyes and you may notice errors that you had not previously noticed. Outline of the article review please include the following categories in your article review.

Literature may include theorizations, conceptualizations, and/or explanations based on empirical studies of the topic. The critical review can be structured through answering the following questions: critical review questions crqs: introduction: 1. What are the very core arguments thesis/theses developed in the literature around the topic? what are their findings if the literature includes empirical research ? what theories are used or developed? how are the core concepts defined? 2. Where is the given literature located in its wider historical and intellectual/theoretical contexts? it is important not to consider the literature as an isolated body of arguments but rather to consider it in relation to other similar attempts to study the topic from different points of view. For instance, if the topic is ‘social class in the post modern time’, one body of ideas that you may like to focus on as your main theme can be the idea of meta industrial class/labor as developed by eco feminist theorist ariel salleh.

The thesis is that the meta industrial labor is a new social class that has the capacity to transform the capitalist relations due to some of its specific features. Historically, such a body of ideas around new classes has emerged in the context of post marxist, post cold war era as the result of failure of classical theories of class in explaining the recent changes in the class composition of modern societies. Here you need to explain how the idea of meta industrial class can be related to and/or located in the wider to examine the given body of ideas or thesis in the literature in terms of its ability to back up the 2 2 2 2 how to write a critical review article? © s a hamed hosseini, 2014 arguments through drawing on adequate and convincing facts, case studies and clarifying 4. To what extent are the arguments in the given literature structured consistently, i.e. Free from logical contradictions? are the definitions of key concepts clear? is the literature self reflexive? this requires the examination of the arguments in terms of their logical consistency and coherence. Finally, if the review is related to a research project with a research question, a very important issue to explore is the capacity of the literature for helping us understand the topic and answer our research question. To what extent is the source/literature able to help us answer our research questions? what are the inadequacies? how useful or effective is their approach towards studying our subject? conclusion 8.

Finally, what are the strengths and limitations of the literature, in sum, and how can the authors improve their arguments? what aspects of the topic need to be studied further? how can the literature deal with its shortcomings and loopholes through incorporating and/or considering the criticisms? highlight the critical points of your review. Instructions: 1 start by developing a rather comprehensive list bibliography of most recent most relevant most relevant most relevant most relevant 3 3 3 3 how to write a critical review article? © s a hamed hosseini, 2014 3 carefully read these selected works that are supposed to be the most relevant notes while bearing your objectives i.e. Search for more relevant sources in the process of writing up your review whenever necessary the most relevant the most relevant the most relevant sources and take 4 write an integrated review of these selected studies out of your notes in an integrated format by engaged in their arguments so you can also compare and reflect on their weaknesses and strengths. Eneral c c c criteria editors or examiners when assessing a review article: riteria riteria riteria for the reviewers to keep in mind when writing their reviews and for the journal 1. Selection of an appropriate number of relevant academic literature journal articles and/or research reports for the purpose of critical literature review a good review should summarize the state of knowledge on a well defined topic in the psychology of men and masculinity in concise and clear ways. This means that the review is written with exceptional clarity, cohesiveness, conciseness, and comprehensiveness. A good review should describe in detail the systematic process or method that was used in doing the literature review.

There are articulated ways to do narrative reviews just as there are ways of doing experiments or meta analyses baumeister amp leary, 1997 bem, 1995. It is not expected that reviews will be able to meet all of the above listed criteria but authors should meet many of them. 2005 , annotation: what do we know about sensory dysfunction in autism? a critical review of the empirical evidence. University of california ndash davis medical center, sacramento ca 95817, usa email: [email protected] article options and tools author s: gunjan soni department of mechanical engineering, birla institute of technology and science bits , pilani, india rambabu kodali department of mechanical engineering, birla institute of technology and science bits , pilani, india citation: gunjan soni. 2012 a critical review of empirical research methodology in supply chain management , journal of manufacturing technology management.

23 iss: 6, pp.753 779 doi downloads: the fulltext of this document has been downloaded 1773 times since 2012 acknowledgements: the authors would like to thank undergraduate students of bits‐pilani, pilani campus and mr amit rajnarayan and mr abhijeet datta for helping in administration of various aspects of the review process. Article options and tools author s: gunjan soni department of mechanical engineering, birla institute of technology and science bits , pilani, india rambabu kodali department of mechanical engineering, birla institute of technology and science bits , pilani, india citation: gunjan soni.

cornell university

guidelines and tips are offered for writing a psychological bulletin review article that will be accessible to the widest possible audience. Techniques are discussed for organizing a review into a coherent narrative, and the importance of giving readers a clear take home message is emphasized.

In addition, advice is given for rewriting a manuscript that has been reviewed and returned with an invitation to revise and resubmit. You have surveyed an experimental literature and arrived at conclusions you believe are worth sharing with the wider psychological community. The purpose of this article is to enhance the chances that the editors of psychological bulletin will let you do so. According to the recent revision of the publication manual of the american psychological association , review articles, including meta analyses, are critical evaluations of material that has already been published.

By organizing, integrating and evaluating previously published material, the author of a review article considers the progress of current research toward clarifying a problem. In a sense, a review article is tutorial in that the author

    defines and clarifies the problem summarizes previous investigations in order to inform the reader of the state of current research identifies relations, contradictions, gaps, and inconsistencies in the literature and suggests the next step or steps in solving the problem. 5
the inside front cover of bulletin further notes that reviews may set forth major developments within a particular research area or provide a bridge between related specialized fields within psychology or between psychology and related fields. As these statements imply, bulletin review articles are directed to a much wider audience than articles appearing in more specialized journals. Indeed, the current editor asserted in his first editorial that every psychologist should read psychological bulletin.

B ecause there is no better way to stay up to date with the field of psychology as a whole. The bulletin provides the best single vehicle for a continuing education in psychology sternberg, 1991, p. Moreover, the journal is frequently consulted by journalists, attorneys, congressional aides, and other nonpsychologists. This means that your review should be accessible to students in psychology 101, your colleagues in the art history department, and your grandmother. No matter how technical or abstruse a review is in its particulars, intelligent nonpsychologists with no expertise in statistics, meta analysis, or experimental design should be able to comprehend the broad outlines of your topic, to understand what you think the accumulated evidence demonstrates, and, above all, to appreciate why someone anyone should give a damn. Thus, many of the writing techniques described in this article are designed to make your review article comprehensible to the widest possible audience.

They are also designed to remain invisible or transparent to readers, thereby infusing your prose with a subliminal pedagogy.

before writing

let me begin on a pessimistic note: the chances that your review will be accepted for publication in psychological bulletin are only about one in five. According to the current editor, the 1 source of immediate rejection letters is narrowly conceived topics r. So the first question to ask about your intended review is whether it is likely to be interesting to a general audience of psychologists. If not, can it at least be made interesting perhaps by extending its reach or setting it in a broader context? if your answer is that you think so, then you have already improved your chances. The second obstacle to publication arises from the nature of the genre itself: authors of literature reviews are at risk for producing mind numbing lists of citations and findings that resemble a phone book impressive cast, lots of numbers, but not much plot. So the second question to ask about your intended review is whether it has a clear take home message.

Again, editor sternberg: literature reviews are often frustrating because they offer neither a point of view nor a take home message. One is left with a somewhat undigested scattering of facts but little with which to put them together. I encourage authors to take a point of view based on theory and to offer readers a take home message that integrates the review.