Use the following questions to engage with the journal article and form your critical analysis:
- Objectives: what does the article set out to do?
- Theory: is there an explicit theoretical framework? If not, are there important theoretical assumptions?
- Concepts: what are the central concepts? Are they clearly defined?
- Argument: what is the central argument? Are there specific hypotheses?
- Method: what methods are employed to test these?
- Evidence: is evidence provided? How adequate is it?
- Values: are value positions clear or are they implicit?
- Literature: how does the work fit into the wider literature?
- Contribution: how well does the work advance our knowledge of the subject?
- Style: how clear is the author’s language/style/expression?
- Conclusion: a brief overall assessment.
The structure of your review should include:
- An initial identification of the article (author, title of the article, title of the journal, year of publication, and other details that seem important, e.g., it is originally a French edition, etc.), and an indication of the major aspects of the article you will be discussing.
- A brief summary of the range, contents and argument of the article. Occasionally you may summarize section by section, but in a short review (1,000-1,500 words) you usually pick up the main themes only. This section should not normally take up more than a third of the total review.
- A critical discussion of 2-3 key issues is raised in the article. This section is the core of your review, 50-60%. You need to make clear the author’s own argument before you criticize and evaluate it. Also you must support your criticisms with evidence from the text or from other writings. You may also want to indicate gaps in the author’s treatment of a topic, but it is seldom useful to criticize a writer for not doing something they never intended to do.
- A final evaluation of the overall contribution that the article has made to your understanding of the topic (and maybe its importance to the development of knowledge in this particular area or discipline, setting it in the context of other writings in the field).You can review the grading criteria for Article Reviews in the Content area.