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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Academic journal | 2/5 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_journal | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T09:52:46.563930+00:00 | kb-cron |
There are two kinds of article or paper submissions in academia: solicited, where an individual has been invited to submit work either through direct contact or through a general submissions call, and unsolicited, where an individual submits a work for potential publication without directly being asked to do so. Upon receipt of a submitted article, editors at the journal determine whether to reject the submission outright or begin the process of peer review. In the latter case, the submission becomes subject to review by outside scholars of the editor's choosing who typically remain anonymous. The number of these peer reviewers (or "referees") varies according to each journal's editorial practice – typically, no fewer than two, though sometimes three or more, experts in the subject matter of the article produce reports upon the content, style, and other factors, which inform the editors' publication decisions. Though these reports are generally confidential, some journals and publishers also practice public peer review. The editors either choose to reject the article, ask for a revision and resubmission, or accept the article for publication. Even accepted articles are often subjected to further (sometimes considerable) editing by journal editorial staff before they appear in print. The peer review can take from several weeks to several months. Many journal articles are broadly structured according to the IMRAD scheme. Each article has several sections, often including the following:
The title; Information about the author(s); The abstract, which is a one-paragraph summary of the article; The introduction, including a background, why the research was done, research on this topic that has been done before, and (possibly) a hypothesis; The methodology or method, which includes the way the research was done, details concerning the study's sample, measures for assessment, and the procedure; Findings or results, which summarize what the study found; Conclusion, comments, or discussion, which both explain how the results answered the questions that were posed, as well as areas that could be researched in the future; A list of works that the article's author cited. Reading an article in an academic journal usually entails first reading the title, to see if it is related to the desired topic. If it is, the next step is to read the abstract (or summary or conclusion, if the abstract is missing), to determine if the article is worth reading. Publishing research results is an essential part of helping science to advance. If scientists are describing experiments or calculations, they should also explain how they did them so that an independent researcher could repeat the experiment or calculation to verify the results, or so that they could evaluate whatever the research article's findings were. Each journal article becomes part of the permanent scientific record.
=== Types of article === Articles can also be categorized by their purpose. The exact terminology and definitions vary by field and specific journal, but often include:
Letters (also called communications, and not to be confused with letters to the editor) are short descriptions of important current research findings that are usually fast-tracked for immediate publication because they are considered urgent. Research notes are short descriptions of current research findings that are considered less urgent or important than Letters. Articles are usually between five and twenty pages and are complete descriptions of current original research findings, but there are considerable variations between different fields and journals—80-page articles are not rare in mathematics or theoretical computer science. Supplemental articles contain a large volume of tabular data that is the result of current research and may be dozens or hundreds of pages with mostly numerical data. Some journals now only publish this data electronically on the Internet. Supplemental information also contains other voluminous material not appropriate for the main body of the article, like descriptions of routine procedures, derivations of equations, source code, non-essential data, spectra or other such miscellaneous information. A target article in a journal is one which argues a case, to which other authors submit a commentary or a response. There may be a final response from the author of the target article. See, for example, Alison Gopnik's article How we know our minds: The illusion of first-person knowledge of intentionality in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Volume 16, Issue 1 (1993), which was one of a pair of "target articles" to which other responses were published in the same volume. Review articles do not cover original research but rather accumulate the results of many different articles on a particular topic into a coherent narrative about the state of the art in that field. Review articles provide information about the topic and also provide journal references to the original research. Reviews may be entirely narrative, or may provide quantitative summary estimates resulting from the application of meta-analytical methods. Data papers are articles dedicated to describe datasets. This type of article is becoming popular and journals exclusively dedicated to them have been established, e.g. Scientific Data and Earth System Science Data. Video papers are a recent addition to practice of academic publications. They most often combine an online video demonstration of a new technique or protocol with a rigorous textual description.
== Reviewing ==
=== Review articles ===