Eager to start writing but don’t know what types of scholarly articles is the best outlet for your research? Find out what you can publish!

Having just finished your experiments or collected all the necessary survey data is exciting. You’ve discovered something no one discovered before and pushed the boundary of knowledge one step ahead, solving particular research challenges, making our life better, safer, more viable and so on. But as a Motivated Academic, you are expected to communicate your research with others. And the best way to do it is to publish your work in scholarly journals. 

Now I know you’re eager to start writing your manuscript and share your outstanding research with your scholarly community. But how do you do it? What are the appropriate types of scholarly articles you should consider? Sometimes it’s easy to select the most appropriate format for your paper, although there are many types of scholarly articles. This is easy especially when you want to share your innovative research outcome or literature review. But there are more types of scholarly articles that you can leverage to maximise your research output. 

Here, I’ll give you an overview of the types of scholarly articles you can consider in your research. By the way, this is an extract of the working version of the book that I’ve started writing some time ago – would you be interested in getting a copy once it’s ready?

What are specific types of scholarly articles?

When doing a literature review for your research project, you must have noticed that there are several different types of scholarly articles that you can use to share your research. It really depends on what is your research is about, and what kind of outputs you produce that dictate the type of scholarly articles you would go for. 

The main types of scholarly articles are a research article and a review article. These are the most common types of articles published by researchers worldwide. In general, the former aims to present the state-of-the-art research outputs, whereas the latter aims to provide a critical review of your research area. And in most cases, you will be fine by just knowing these two types of articles. 

However, there are also different types of scholarly articles that you can use to promote your work better. I get you. Sometimes you may feel like you have something very specific to share with your research community, but it may not be enough for either review or a research paper. You may just want to share your perspective or your own opinion about the subject. 

Luckily for you, there are different types of scholarly articles publications that enable you to do it! For example, you may have heard about short communications or perspective papers that are much shorter than research papers. You may have noticed also noticed mini-review articles or short reviews. From my experience, I can share that there are lots of different types of scholarly articles, but we can distinguish 6 main types that I will talk about in this article: 

• research article
• review article
• mini-review article
• perspective article
• short communication article 
• comments

What makes it confusing is the fact that each publisher tends to name these papers differently. For example, some publishers allow you to publish short communications. Another publisher may call it a feature article. Some publishers allow you to publish a perspective article, an article type that is sometimes called an opinion article. It’s just a bit confusing.

How to deal with this? Well, the best way is to actually check the details with the scholarly journal that you’re interested in and read their guidelines for authors. Remember, if you want to publish in a new journal, it is always a very good idea to read the guidance for authors and check their recently published articles. This will help you tailor your work better to that journal and increase your chances of getting published there right. 

Below, I will review the main types of manuscripts that you can come across with different scholarly publishers. I’m going to write this on on the example of Energy and Environmental Science that is published by the Royal Society of Chemistry.  This is because I published both a review paper and a research paper with them and I believe this is one of the best journals in the energy area. I’m really proud of my work published with them. I also found the guidance for authors very straightforward and explained the different types of scholarly articles in a very approachable manner. 

Scholarly article #1: research article

What is a research paper?

A research paper, aka. a full research article or a research article, aims to present research that hasn’t been published before and is, therefore, considered novel and original. It is one of the most commonly used types of scholarly articles.

It means that it shouldn’t present just standard engineering work, standard practice or standard procedures and investigations relevant to your research area. If you want to publish a research article, you really need to push the boundaries of knowledge and your work need to kind of present a substantial extension of the original material or actually develop something new, providing new insights and so on. 

What is a length and structure of a research paper?

Research papers usually are somewhere between 5000 to 8000 words, considering the main body of the text. This is usually about 5-10 printed pages of the journal.

Their structure usually contains very distinctive elements.

An introduction that includes the fundamental literature review to support your hypothesis and your idea. It’s important to have a very brief introduction and literature review that gives the reader a relevant context. They should be able to understand how you came up with your idea. It should also present the challenge that other researchers haven’t solved it. Finally, if it’s written correctly,  your reader will understand what you have done in your work and why you have done it. They need this background information to understand what is the main idea behind your work, the main reason for doing it, and why this work is an important right. 

Once you provide the context and the novelty of your work you usually are asked to represent methods, tools and frameworks that you applied in your research. For example, if your work is computational like mine, you will be required to present your model’s equations and validate your models. Again, it’s important to emphasise that your methods should be written so that others can easily replicate your work and build on your work. 

Then you go into results and discussion and finally conclusions from your work. These are the most important sections of each research paper! 

I also wanted to mention that sometimes, the methodology section, for example, in Science, is included at the end of the manuscript. In this case, the structure of a research paper is the following: introduction, results, discussion, conclusions and then methodology at the very end. This aims to emphasise the key outcomes of your work. If someone is actually interested in the methodology you used, they can find it later in the manuscript.

Please remember that I ignored the article’s references here and will do so for the other types of articles. References to other work and web archives in any journal article are crucial, and I assume you understand that these are fundamentals to ethical scholarly communication.  

Scholarly article #2: review article

What is a review paper?

Review papers, aka. review articles or simply reviews, aim to present a critical account of specific aspects published in the existing body of knowledge. This can include a critical review of articles published in your entire research area, or focusing on specific concepts, technologies or techniques – you name it.  It is one of the most commonly used types of scholarly articles.

You can see that the scope of a review paper is completely different from that of a research paper.  However, it shouldn’t just be a standard literature review that presents an overview of articles published in your research area. 

A review paper is a specific type of scholarly article. It should present a new way of thinking, shed new light, and critically analyse the current body of knowledge in your research area. In addition, a great review paper should identify the research gaps that are yet to be resolved in your research field.

Therefore, the main idea behind a review paper is to synthesise the recent research developments that are significant to your research area and paint a coherent perspective for future directions.

What is a length and structure of a review paper?

Review papers are much more detailed and definitely larger scholarly articles than research papers.  You are more likely to include about 8,000 to 12,000 words. Some journals actually allow you to include 15000 words in your review article. 

As I mentioned above, it is a good practice to actually check with the specific journal to align the length of your literature review with their requirements.   

The structure of a  review paper is a little bit more tricky to explain than that of the research paper. The structure of your review article depends on whether your review is a systematic literature review or a more standard critical appraisal of the research field to identify the research gaps.

But luckily, I’ve reviewed hundreds of review articles published in the web archive so that I can provide you with some guidance on the structure you can use. 

A review paper will include an introduction that needs to provide sufficient background, context and motivation for that review.  The key to writing a good review paper is to provide a clear explanation of the contribution this review paper will make to the field of research. 

I also highly advise you to check whether there have been any previous review papers published on your topic and summarise what they review. Then, you may want to specify the scope of that research papers in the form of a summary table. I found it a very easy way to justify the exact contribution of your review article. 

Unless you are doing a systematic literature review, you wouldn’t include the methods and materials section in your review paper. However, if you are doing a systematic review paper,  you need to present the exact way you collected your data, how you decided on the selection of keywords and search strings and need to present the data that you actually collected, e.g., the overview of scholarly articles you selected for your analysis and so on. 

The next part of your review paper depends on the subject and depends on the focus of your literature review. For example, in the articles I published in Energy and Environmental Science, I focused on experimental testing and modelling of the calcium looping process. Therefore, I had a section on experimental testing, reactor modelling or kinetic modelling and systems modelling. In another review paper, I wrote that was also focused on calcium looping for carbon capture and hydrogen production, I essentially distinguished between the hydrogen production technologies and the carbon capture applications.

Therefore, the structure of your review paper will depend on the way you can categorise the journal articles published in the current literature. 

As I mentioned above, besides providing an overview of the articles published in the current literature, your review paper needs to add value to the current body of knowledge. You can do this by including an additional analysis of the results you compile in a way that helps you distil the research gaps. 

The final section of your review paper should not merely overview what you’ve found out from your literature review. Instead, you should be able to present a perspective for the future of your research field. 

Scholarly article #3: mini-review article

What is a mini-review paper?

A mini-review paper is rarely considered in scholarly communication. It is a kind of review paper but it’s much more focused on the specific topic. It is also much more concentrated and shorter. 

Similarly to a review paper, it aims to present the main ideas in a particular field of study. However, its scope is much more limited. It aims to represent an important new field of research and focuses on a particular category/technology/concept. Again as with any review article, it needs to be timely and add a new perspective to the existing literature. It shouldn’t be just a literature review of articles available in web archives like Scopus or Web of Science.

In my view, it is one of the types of scholarly articles that we could use more often.

What is a length and structure of a mini-review paper?

Most of the mini-review articles are usually up to about 3000 words.  There is, therefore, a substantial difference between the full reviews and mini-review papers. 

The structure of a mini-review paper is also much more condensed. Therefore, your introduction would not be as extensive as that for the full review paper,  but still we need to provide a sufficient context and background for your work.  The main body of your mini-review paper will focus on a particular subject or particular idea that may actually provide a future direction for your research field. 

Scholarly article #5: perspective

What is a perspective paper?

One of the most misunderstood types of scholarly articles is a perspective article, aka. an opinion article. The main idea behind such an article is to present a personal, and in most cases speculative, perspective on the exciting research you’re doing.

Perspectives aim to present your innovative viewpoint or hypothesis on a topic that is currently of interest to the research community in your field. Importantly, despite their speculative nature, such articles still need to be rigorous and backed by sound scientific evidence with sufficient references. This means that you wouldn’t be able to publish something that’s not legit.

In my view, it is one of the types of scholarly articles that we could use more often, especially since it allows us to share our own views and opinions.

What is a length and structure of a perspective paper?

The length of perspective papers varies depending on the publisher (again!). As a rule of thumb, you should aim to represent your thoughts and ideas in about 1000-2000 words. This is not much space to communicate your exciting research, so you need to squeeze the essence of your message. That’s why writing a perspective paper is a rather challenging, and sometimes even more time-consuming task than writing a full research paper. 

The structure of perspective/opinion is less defined than that of research and review articles. Broadly speaking, it will still include the introduction, main message, results and discussion paragraphs and conclusions/recommendation sections.

Scholarly article #4: short communication

What is a short communication?

The rationale behind a short communication article, also known as a communication paper, is similar to that of the research article – to communicate original and highly significant research outcomes. This can be either a complete or a preliminary study that deserves rapid publication because of its ground-breaking nature. However, short communications are much more focused on the novelty and the transformational nature of your work. 

Short communications tend to be among the preferred types of scholarly articles in fast pacing research fields.

What is a length and structure of a perspective paper?

A short communication article tends to be shorter than the full research paper and is usually limited to 2000-3500 words. These usually are not divided into sections. Nevertheless, the content of your paper should still follow the standard structure of abstract, introduction/background, methods, results, discussion. 

Scholarly article #6: comments

What is a comment?

Did you know that many journals encourage you to submit comments to stimulate the discussion and exchange of scientific opinions between the readers and authors? These usually serve to add another perspective to or critique already published articles. Comments can include alternative analysis or new insights and should not be treated as means to attack authors personally. These tend to be more popular in some research areas, especially where a short publication cycle is crucial to innovation.

I know that comments may not be seen by many as one of the types of scholarly articles, but some journals tend to assign comments with article DOI.

What is a length and structure of a comment?

Although comments are usually not as limited as other papers, some journals (i.e. Science) restrict the length of comments to about 1000 words. The comment usually starts with a discussion of the original published article and then moves on to the main body of the comment.

Conclusions

Developing scholarly communication skills is key to getting your name known in your research field. That is why you should know what types of scholarly articles are available to you.

Although the majority of our research is published either as a review article or a research article, there are times when we need more flexibility. Does any of the types of scholarly articles I mentioned in this appeal to you the most? Feel free to share your views in the comments.

I also wanted to share that this is an extract of the working version of the book that I started writing some time ago – would you be interested in getting a copy once it’s ready?