Research Guides: BIOL 306: Anatomy & Physiology: Types of Articles

Types of Scientific Articles

	Research	Review	News
Values & Uses	Describes experiment generally testing one hypothesis. Insightful analysis and commentary.	Summary of topic describing previously published research by many researchers.	Current information and updates about topic.
Language and/or Format	Written as a lab report with a LONG title and usually with these sections: abstract, introduction, methods, results, discussion/conclusion, literature cited.	Usually does not give much information about how experiments were performed. Summarizes findings.
Authors & their Affiliation	Scientist/researcher who actually did the research; their affiliation will be given at beginning or end of article with brief biographical sketch.	Researcher in science.	Science journalists or correspondents. Author did not do the experiments.
Quality	Peer-reviewed.	Usually peer-reviewed.	Not peer-reviewed.
Sources Given	Literature review and list of sources.	Very long list of references.	Few references, if any. Might be embedded in the article.
Publisher	Professional society or specific scientific publishers.	Professional society or specific scientific publishers.	Commercial publishers.
Graphics	Several graphs or tables of data.	Graphs or tables of data borrowed from cited articles or other sources.	Photographs, often color, and few charts or graphs of data.