Analysis of Scholarly Article

The research article, Living alone is associated with all-cause and cardiovascular mortality: 32 years of follow-up in the Copenhagen Male Study, was produced by the European Heart Journal and published on the Oxford Academic database. The research presented in this submission solidifies the link between a solitary lifestyle and premature death in males. This is accomplished through the use of observational research and is clearly described in the methods and results section of the article.

This scholarly article is similar to most research entries, it describes the purpose of the research, details how the study was executed and provides the results of the research. This article has most of the same components as another scholarly article, however, due to the uniqueness of the research and how it was conducted certain components of the IMRAD format are missing. The article makes use of an abstract, methods, results, and a conclusion section.

The first section of the article is the abstract section, one of the sections in the IMRAD template. While an abstract is a shared trait of many scholarly research articles this abstract seems to have a dual purpose; Reading the article it appears that the researchers used the abstract section to serve as an introduction. The abstract, in this article, briefly summarizes the purpose of the article and is located at the very beginning of the article, this is parallel to the IMRAD layout. The abstract is presented in the present tense and the diction suggests that this in an abstract in the informative IMRAD format.

The methods section in this article, for the most part, followed the IMRAD format. The method was the second section in the report and it outlined the procedure in which the researchers were able to generate their results. Another similarity between the researcher’s format and the IMRAD format is the switch to past tense in the methods section, compared to the abstract section. This particular methods section was written in paragraph format but there was not significant emphasis bestowed on this section. Considering the observational nature of this research it is understandable that the methods section is not as long as a report on an experimental study. The IMRAD format acknowledges that methods have a variety of styles dependent on how precise the steps must be executed to reproduce similar data. An important trait, of this specific methods section, to note is the incorporation of the results within the methods. A fair amount of the results section was incorporated within the methods, with little distinguishment towards the end of the section that was exclusively numerical results. It seems as if the purpose of this was to justify some of the methods used but this takes away from the clarity and significance of the methods section. The methods and results section should be separated so that the methods could effectively establish a framework of the process, in turn making both sections more significant. The combining of the methods and results is a significant difference between the researcher’s approach and the IMRAD style.

The article’s final section was a conclusion section. This conclusion is a good example of the IMRAD discussion section. This section relates back to the abstract and summarizes the major points and reiterates the findings. This section also implies action that could be taken to change policy and advance the current practices. The only step that could be used to further the quality of this section is to discuss the limitations of the methods and possible error.

References

Magnus T Jensen, Jacob L Marott, Andreas Holtermann, Finn Gyntelberg; Living alone is associated with all-cause and cardiovascular mortality: 32 years of follow-up in the Copenhagen Male Study, European Heart Journal – Quality of Care and Clinical Outcomes, , qcz004, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehjqcco/qcz004