Research and Doctoral Studies Resources: Practitioner Vs. Scholarly

Practitioner articles: These are frequently based on real-life experiences or observations—are primarily written by a professional in a given field to support colleagues in a variety of ways including advising, establishing best practices, and noting trends.  These can also be considered peer-reviewed.

The easiest way to identify practitioner articles is that they provide 'straight to the point' information and are not about publicizing an original research study.

Example below:

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Scholarly research articles: These are primary sources that report the methods and results of an original study performed by authors.  The kind of study may vary (i.e. experiment, survey, interview, case studies, etc.), but in all cases, raw data has been collected and analyzed by the authors with conclusions drawn from the results of that analysis.

The easiest way to identify research articles is looking at the abstract--if one can clearly see data, methods and results/discussion section of a research study/experiment, (and does not mention the word "review" in the title), it is very likely a research article.

Example below:

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