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FRIPS: Freshmen Research in Plant Sciences: Articles

Anatomy of a journal article

A research article in a journal normally has the following sections:

  1. Title--simple summary of the main idea of the paper
  2. Name of authors(s) and institutional affiliation
  3. Abstract--brief summary of the article
  4. Introduction--discusses prior research and states the study's purpose, rationale and hypothesis
  5. Methods--detailed description of how study was conducted
  6. Results--summary of data collected and statistical treatment of data
  7. Discussion--reviews, interprets and evaluates results of the study particularly with respect to the original hypothesis
  8. Acknowledgements
  9. References--literature cited

Databases for finding journal articles