Why do journal articles have to be such hard work?

I know it can feel like that when you start reading them for the first time.
In fact it can on occasions still feel like that even in your final year. But the academics who write this stuff aren't a different species; they aren't even brainiacs remember. It's just because they've had lots of practice at writing in this particular style.

Your part in this dance between reader and writer is to learn the steps to reading journals. Which you mostly achieve with a combination of background research (you wouldn't try and drive an F1 car without having had some time in a Mini first!) from books and sheer dogged determination.

I'd also like to recommend a book that may help you get to grips with journals.

It's only in paper and we have loads of copies at the moment. The book itself is quite small, written with a very light touch and incredibly useful.

It's called How to Read Journal Articles in the Social Sciences and it's by Cho.
Chapters 4 and 5 are particularly useful I think.

A book to help you understand journal articles

I spend quite a lot of my working week looking for books to buy for you. This can be a trawl at times because authors rarely write books on exactly the subject I'm after on your behalf. Authors are like that. They rarely do what I tell them.

But occasionally the right book gets written and I'm able to tell you about it. This is one of those occasions. If you're a first or second year (or even a final year student who should seriously know better!) who occasionally struggles with journal articles this is the book for you. It's called 'How to Read Journal articles in the Social Sciences' and may be exactly what you're looking for.

It's simply written (tick), is quite short (tick), tells you how to analyse abstracts and method sections (big tick) and has some nice tips on how to avoid going word blind when confronted with too much material. Chapters 4 and 5 are particularly useful and suggests a coding system to record what you read. 

I'm even going to tell you where it is in the library; go to the 3rd floor and find shelf 300 CHO (the author is called Chong).

What are you waiting for? Go get one...