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University of Denver

University Libraries

Research Guides

CHEM 1001: Article Evaluation Exercise

An Example

Assignment Example 1

Imagine that I am a student in your class. Here is the process that I would go through to choose an article for this project:

  1. Finding My Popular Article: As a starting point, I visited the Scientific American website. At the top of the website I searched for "climate change". I limited my results to the past 12 months and found the following article: Look Out Lemurs: Climate Change Is Taking Your Land
     
  2. Evaluating My Popular Article: The article mentions the study was published the week of Feb 19th, 2015, in Ecology and Evolution by the investigators Jason Brown and Anne Yoder from Yale University. 
     
  3. Finding my Peer-Reviewed Article: I can then use the library catalog to find their peer-reviewed article using the information provided in the Scientific American article: 

    From my search, I find Brown and Yoder's article called, "Shifting ranges and conservation challenges for lemurs in the face of climate change" which also contains information in the catalog that this publication is a "Peer Reviewed Journal"

Assignment Example 2

Assignment Example 2

  1. Finding My Popular Article: I decided to see if there were any articles about climate change in the New York Times. I did the following search on Google, using the site limiter to only search climate change articles published in The New York Times:

    My Google search results included several articles, one of which was particularly interesting: 

     

  2. Evaluating My Popular Article: This article describes a recent study, is interesting to me, and provides me with enough information to understand the issue and track down the original study. 

  3. Finding my Peer-Reviewed Article: The article mentions a "2014 Yale Study" but does not provide the authors or any other information. Luckily there is a link to the raw data from the NYTimes article and at the bottom of the 2014 Yale Study, there's a citation to a published article that describes the methods for the study's data collection:

    Howe, P., Mildenberger, M., Marlon, J.R., and Leiserowitz, A., “Geographic variation in opinions on climate change at state and local scales in the USA, Nature Climate Change. DOI: 10.1038/nclimate2583.

  4. Evaluating My Peer-Reviewed Article: I want to make sure that Nature Climate Change is a peer-reviewed or refereed journal, so I'll check UlrichsWeb Global Series Directory to search the journal title (Nature Climate Change) and see if it is a refereed or peer-reviewed journal. See the UlrichsWeb sidebar tips for completing this step.