Title, Authors, & Author Credentials
This section contains the title of the article, the names of all of the authors (those who contributed to the work contained within), as well as the affiliations (both institutional and departmental) of all listed authors
Abstract
The abstract is a short summary of the entire article - by reading the abstract you should be able to get a good idea of what is contained within the full article. This can help you to decide whether this article will suit your purpose.
Background / Introduction
The background (or introduction) gives you relevant information about the topic being discussed in the article. Its purpose is to "bring you up to speed" on that particular topic so that you will have enough of a basic understanding to proceed with the rest of the paper. However, introductory sections presuppose a certain amount of knowledge within that topic so you may have to read a review article or textbook to get more basic introductory information on the topic if you are still confused after reading this section.
Materials and Methods
The materials and methods section (sometimes called experimental procedures) gives you a step by step discussion of how the experiments were done. This serves two purposes: first, it theoretically allows you to repeat the work done by the authors, and second it allows the reader to decide whether the conclusions drawn by the authors are warranted in light of the methods they used.
Results
The results section is a statement of the results of the experiments performed. No attempt is made to analyze what those results mean - this section is facts only.
Discussion / Conclusions
In this section the authors will discuss what they feel the significance of their results is. E.g., what their results mean in the context of other studies, whether or not they feel that one or another hypothesis is supported by their data, what new questions are raised by their results, etc.
References / Works Cited
In a scholarly paper it is important for the authors to indicate where they got their information from. Therefore, any prior articles which relates to their work must be cited both here in the works cited section as well as in the text itself.
I have used the following article as an example: Hwang, YT. et al. "Localization of the Carnation Italian ringspot virus replication protein p36 to the mitochondrial outer membrane is mediated by an internal targeting signal and the TOM complex" BMC Cell Biology, 9 (54)
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2121/9/54
