Article Review Writing 101

Published: 9th Oct 2016 | Last Updated: 11th Sep 2018 | Views: 140

Review paper writing

We come into this world to live, to be joyful and to bring joy to others, and to learn every minute detail of the world we live in. We come into this world, and we seek crazy experiences: an experience of fear, an experience of life, an experience of love and an experience of knowledge. College is exactly the place where you can experience everything of the mentioned above. It is full of surprises and each day here is filled with new opportunities for studying and learning. When a student, you get a lot of writing assignments, you learn how to write, and in the end, you will know how to write your graduate paper. An article review paper is one of such assignments.

Maybe, this article won’t be particularly useful for you, and you won’t learn anything brand-new from here, but take a look at this article, read it and try to recollect what you’ve already learned, and you have a great chance to brush it up to know it clearly.

article review format

What Is an article review format ?

An article review is a type of custom writing, aimed at providing an evenhanded criticism of already written article; usually, such reviews are written to trace evident mistakes, to evaluate the importance of a conducted research, to offer an explanation to readers and to emphasize strong points of a research. In the first place, you get this assignment to learn creative and spontaneous writing. You learn how to structure and how to organize your thoughts properly. This is a great opportunity to try yourself as a writer or as a blogger (well, sometimes, it’s not the case, but why not, huh?), to study a chosen topic from the ground and to become an expert in it, to prove that your point of view has a right to exist. As a rule, your instructor chooses the topic of your article, and gives you some guidelines on what article to review, and what you should include or mention in it. Such assignments may be directly related to your field of study, they are aimed at expanding knowledge in this area.

Generally, an article review follows the APA (American Psychological Association) formatting style, which is difficult and notable writing style on the one hand, but on the other hand, it is the most applicable style. As an article is usually written in complex and very specific language, you should have enough knowledge of the subject. Further, you should know and comply with the APA formatting style requirements, and write your article review in the APA format.

The APA formatting style requirements are applied to:

Title Page;
Length of Title;
Page Header;
Page Number;
Margins;
Font;
In-Text Citations/Quotations;
References;

For more information, please consult the APA-style manual.

However, if it is not enough, you can always ask your instructor to show you a couple of article review examples with APA formatting, or you can address any search engine for some examples of article review formats.

How to write an article rewiew?

To make your life a bit easier in terms of article review writing, a few tips on the given topic will be appropriate:

Read the Entire Article. It is the first thing you should do; it is the essence of the whole assignment. You need to understand an article, and you need to jump on a message of the article. It is recommended to read the article several times, if the field of study of the article is specific, and its language is difficult for spontaneous representation. After that, you should select a statement that more effectively represents the main idea of such review and your personal thoughts as well. Present your ideas and thoughts rationally, and remember: do not overuse specific scientific language unknown to your readers.

Create an Article Header. Start writing your review with creating a header of your article. Here you should include the citations of sources being reviewed. The citation of a chosen source should be mentioned at the top of your paper following the APA style requirements (for more information, please consult the APA manual). You will need the author’s name, the first initial, middle initial (if any), year, month, date (or just the year), title of the article, title of a journal or a magazine (please note that it should be italicized), volume of a journal or a magazine (it should be italicized as well), issue of a volume (if any), pages, and DOI number (if any). For example:

Mirolad, L. (1 December 2014). Use of analogies in the study of diffusion. Advances in Physiology Education. 38 (4). 366-367. DOI: 10.1152/advan.00027.2014

Write a Summary. When you are through with the previous stages, the next thing that you should do is to write a summary of the reviewed article. Limit your summary to several paragraphs, but try not to exceed three paragraphs, unless your article is a big one. You should also mention the research subject, the author’s intentions on performing a research, the core idea, the study conduction process, the article’s relation to other works and similar research published by other scientists on the subject, etc. Finally, end your summary with stating the results of the research. In addition, you can also indicate other evident and appropriate information.

article review writing

Review Body. Later, you should write the body of your review – add your subjective reasoning to the article. Just remember, as any other review, this one should also be evenhanded. Here you may discuss the article itself, point out some significant mistakes of the research, and give proper evidence of these mistakes. Moreover, you may support your observations with your own examples on that matter and how to overcome some problems or fix these mistakes. In general, the body of your review should be written in a couple of paragraphs. However, if your article is huge, subsequently, the body of the review may be larger.

Concluding Review. Every good article review should have a great conclusion. Try to stick to the rule mentioned above, and try to write your conclusion in several paragraphs. Usually, there may be two of them. Here you capsule the article’s discussion, give your opinion and appraisal of the article; it may contain your understanding of the article. You may provide your opinion as to how the author may develop this research, what his or her next step should be, and how the knowledge provided by the author may contribute to the overall field of study.

Citing and Proofreading. Formatting direct quotations and in-text citations may be a highly delicate task, as it needs a lot of learning and remembering while completing this task. The first thing you should remember about citing and quoting in APA style is that in both cases you should mention the author’s name, year of publication, and page numbers (for more information, please consult the APA-style manual). When you are done, forget about your review for one day (provided you have such opportunity), or for a couple of hours to let your eyes rest from the work. On the following day, or a bit later, you may return to your task and proofread the text for possible weak points and mistakes. Maybe, there are some points that need to be revised. Then, re-read your review altogether once again. If you doubt your proofreading or editing skills, you can ask someone more proficient in editing than you are.

Writing an article review isn’t really a difficult assignment, if you remember some key points of this task. It is a work of art in a sense, just it’s intangible, it is the art of science. Everything requires practice – the more you practice something, the more proficient you become. Submitting these kinds of assignments may be essential for your career. So do not miss your chance!

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