How to read and comprehend scientific research articles. Scientific articles are how scholars and researchers communicate with each other. Reading scientific articles helps you become part of the conversation of your discipline by learning about the research that has come before you. Textbooks, websites, and popular sources are useful starting places for general information, but for the most current scholarly information, there is no substitute for scientific articles.
This tutorial will discuss how to read a scientific article, how to find the main points of the article, and how to take effective notes. Although it seems counterintuitive, the least effective way to read a scientific article is from start to finish. Instead, expert researchers skim articles to identify key findings.
The structure of scientific articles is defined by several distinct sections. Most articles, like lab reports, are divided into five sections. The abstract, the introduction, the methods, the results, and the discussion.
The most effective way to read an article is in this order. Abstract, discussion, introduction, results, and methods. By going through articles in this order, you'll be able to quickly find the information you need to determine if the article will be useful. After you read each section, ask yourself whether the article is interesting and relevant enough to your research assignment, which will help you decide whether to continue reading it.
Abstracts usually contain four kinds of information. The purpose or rationale of study, why they did it, the methodology, how they did it, results, what they found, and the conclusion, what it means. After reading the abstract, ask yourself, is this article worth reading or should I move on to another one? The Discussion section provides a clear answer to the question posed in the introduction and explains how their results support their conclusions.
Once you have read this section, think about whether you understand and believe the author's claims. Introductions serve two purposes. Stimulating interest in the subject and putting the article in a larger context.
Generally, introductions do this by leading readers from the general to the specific to the focused question the authors are asking. Thus, authors describe previous work and how their work relates to it. Before moving on to the next section, ask, Why did the researchers do this study? and Does the research question match up with the conclusions I read in the discussion. The results section states what the authors found and key data, often shown in figures or tables.
Before moving on to the next section, ask whether the data collected is appropriate to answer the research question and if the data support the conclusions. The methods section tells the reader what experiments were done to answer the question stated in the introduction. Methods can be difficult to read for students because of the technical language and a level of detail sufficient for another trained scientist to repeat the experiments.
However, you can more fully understand the design of the experiments and evaluate their validity by reading the methods section carefully. While you are reading through the article, also distinguish the author's main points. It can be difficult to distinguish between the main point and less relevant sub-points.
Key places to look for main points include the article's title, the abstract, keywords, the figure and table titles, and the first sentence or last couple of sentences in the introduction section. Within the article, some useful words to clue you in on the author's main points include, we hypothesize that, we propose, we introduce. Another important part of reading and comprehending scientific articles is taking notes.
Effective note-taking will save you time and help you clarify your thoughts. Creating a standard template for taking notes will help you organize your research, enable you to make quick comparisons, and will save you time re-reading articles. Reading scientific articles is challenging, but reading them in A-D-I-R-M order Correctly identifying the author's main points and taking effective notes will save you time and make your research easier.
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