A peer-reviewed journal article is a scholarly work that has been reviewed by other people in the field.  This is to make sure that the information in the article is valid before the research is published in a journal.  For this reason, peer-reviewed journals are highly credible resources.

What to Consider

This kind of article requires a title that explains the topic of your research, an introduction, a section for methodology, another section for results, and a final discussion.

The beginning of your article should introduce your topic, share the questions you have about it, and include a literature review.  This review is similar to an annotated bibliography in the way that you need to summarize and analyze the content of your sources.  The literature review establishes what information on your topic currently exists, and you can explain how your research will add to it.

The methodology section is where you can detail your approach to answering the questions you posed in your introduction.  This is also where you’ll describe the process behind how you found your results.

The section following the methodology is the results section.  This section is where you’ll detail the findings of your research experiment, which you’ll later discuss and further analyze in your discussions.

Your discussions and conclusions connect your results with the findings of prior research in the field.  Evaluating your results will help you answer the questions you began your research with, and possibly create new questions for research in the future.

 

Take a look at these links for more about the peer-reviewed journal genre:

The genre of research articles

How to recognize peer-reviewed (refereed) journals