The significance of reading academic journal articles

During your Degree programme, you are required to read academic refereed journal articles. Why is it important for students to do so? Reasons are as follows:

1. The quality of academic journal articles is assured via the vigorous peer-reviewed process
2. The quality of these articles is assured because the literature review and research methods carried out in producing these articles are more more vigorously formulated and explicitly explained
3. The line of reasoning of these articles tend to be more exploratory, logical, critical, innovative, and clearly expressed.
4. Academic journal articles demonstrate (i) how proper literature review can be conducted and (ii) very often how sophisticated theory-driven analysis can be carried out. Reading these academic articles help you to improve your research skills.
5. These articles tend to explain clearly their academic and/ or practical values.
6. Their academic writing style is appropriate for dissertation report writing, which students doing final year dissertations need to master.
7. These articles have mainly been produced by serious writers, and often the reported works are funded by various organizations. They can be the products of much intellectual efforts, as supported with sponsored funding. Thus, these reports very often present content of high research and practical value.

Because of that, academic journal articles have academic and practical values that cannot be offered by textbooks, which tend to be more explanatory in nature. In literature review exercise (e.g. for doing final year dissertation projects), students need to study relevant academic journal articles; they cannot solely rely on textbooks and/or professional journals for this purpose.

I understand that academic journal articles are not easy for students to read and that not all academic journal articles have good academic and practical values. Still, it is important for undergraduate students (and graduates) to learn how to read academic journal articles; it is important for Master degree students (graduates) to read academic journal articles as a hobby/ habit. Finally, it is important for PhD students (graduates) to learn how to write academic journal articles.

Undergraduate students who do not read academic journal articles are not undergraduate students; Master degree students who do not develop a habit/ hobby to read academic journal articles are not Master degree students. Finally, Ph.D. students who do not know how to write academic journal articles of publishable quality are not Ph.D students. Reading academic journal articles is an important activity for continuous professional development of University students/ graduates. Learning how to find useful academic journal articles from university e-library is at the same time a research skill that strengthens students/ graduates' problem-solving capability in work settings.

Now, some of my Master Degree students do not even know how to use university e-library, and some overseas universities in Hong Kong do not offer e-library to their Undergraduate students..