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How to read and understand a scientific paper

How to read and understand a scientific paper: a guide for non-scientists, london school of economics and political science, jennifer raff.

From vaccinations to climate change, getting science wrong has very real consequences. But journal articles, a primary way science is communicated in academia, are a different format to newspaper articles or blogs and require a level of skill and undoubtedly a greater amount of patience. Here  Jennifer Raff   has prepared a helpful guide for non-scientists on how to read a scientific paper. These steps and tips will be useful to anyone interested in the presentation of scientific findings and raise important points for scientists to consider with their own writing practice.

My post,  The truth about vaccinations: Your physician knows more than the University of Google  sparked a very lively discussion, with comments from several people trying to persuade me (and the other readers) that  their  paper disproved everything that I’d been saying. While I encourage you to go read the comments and contribute your own, here I want to focus on the much larger issue that this debate raised: what constitutes scientific authority?

It’s not just a fun academic problem. Getting the science wrong has very real consequences. For example, when a community doesn’t vaccinate children because they’re afraid of “toxins” and think that prayer (or diet, exercise, and “clean living”) is enough to prevent infection, outbreaks happen.

“Be skeptical. But when you get proof, accept proof.” –Michael Specter

What constitutes enough proof? Obviously everyone has a different answer to that question. But to form a truly educated opinion on a scientific subject, you need to become familiar with current research in that field. And to do that, you have to read the “primary research literature” (often just called “the literature”). You might have tried to read scientific papers before and been frustrated by the dense, stilted writing and the unfamiliar jargon. I remember feeling this way!  Reading and understanding research papers is a skill which every single doctor and scientist has had to learn during graduate school.  You can learn it too, but like any skill it takes patience and practice.

I want to help people become more scientifically literate, so I wrote this guide for how a layperson can approach reading and understanding a scientific research paper. It’s appropriate for someone who has no background whatsoever in science or medicine, and based on the assumption that he or she is doing this for the purpose of getting a  basic  understanding of a paper and deciding whether or not it’s a reputable study.

The type of scientific paper I’m discussing here is referred to as a  primary research article . It’s a peer-reviewed report of new research on a specific question (or questions). Another useful type of publication is a  review article . Review articles are also peer-reviewed, and don’t present new information, but summarize multiple primary research articles, to give a sense of the consensus, debates, and unanswered questions within a field.  (I’m not going to say much more about them here, but be cautious about which review articles you read. Remember that they are only a snapshot of the research at the time they are published.  A review article on, say, genome-wide association studies from 2001 is not going to be very informative in 2013. So much research has been done in the intervening years that the field has changed considerably).

Before you begin: some general advice

Reading a scientific paper is a completely different process than reading an article about science in a blog or newspaper. Not only do you read the sections in a different order than they’re presented, but you also have to take notes, read it multiple times, and probably go look up other papers for some of the details. Reading a single paper may take you a very long time at first. Be patient with yourself. The process will go much faster as you gain experience.

Most primary research papers will be divided into the following sections: Abstract, Introduction, Methods, Results, and Conclusions/Interpretations/Discussion. The order will depend on which journal it’s published in. Some journals have additional files (called Supplementary Online Information) which contain important details of the research, but are published online instead of in the article itself (make sure you don’t skip these files).

Before you begin reading, take note of the authors and their institutional affiliations. Some institutions (e.g. University of Texas) are well-respected; others (e.g.  the Discovery Institute ) may appear to be legitimate research institutions but are actually agenda-driven.  Tip:  g oogle  “Discovery Institute” to see why you don’t want to use it as a scientific authority on evolutionary theory.

Also take note of the journal in which it’s published. Reputable (biomedical) journals will be indexed by  Pubmed . [EDIT: Several people have reminded me that non-biomedical journals won’t be on Pubmed, and they’re absolutely correct! (thanks for catching that, I apologize for being sloppy here). Check out  Web of Science  for a more complete index of science journals. And please feel free to share other resources in the comments!]  Beware of  questionable journals .

As you read, write down  every single word  that you don’t understand. You’re going to have to look them all up (yes, every one. I know it’s a total pain. But you won’t understand the paper if you don’t understand the vocabulary. Scientific words have extremely precise meanings).

Step-by-step instructions for reading a primary research article

1. Begin by reading the introduction, not the abstract.

The abstract is that dense first paragraph at the very beginning of a paper. In fact, that’s often the only part of a paper that many non-scientists read when they’re trying to build a scientific argument. (This is a terrible practice—don’t do it.).  When I’m choosing papers to read, I decide what’s relevant to my interests based on a combination of the title and abstract. But when I’ve got a collection of papers assembled for deep reading, I always read the abstract last. I do this because abstracts contain a succinct summary of the entire paper, and I’m concerned about inadvertently becoming biased by the authors’ interpretation of the results.

2. Identify the BIG QUESTION.

Not “What is this paper about”, but “What problem is this entire field trying to solve?”

This helps you focus on why this research is being done.  Look closely for evidence of agenda-motivated research.

3. Summarize the background in five sentences or less.

Here are some questions to guide you:

What work has been done before in this field to answer the BIG QUESTION? What are the limitations of that work? What, according to the authors, needs to be done next?

The five sentences part is a little arbitrary, but it forces you to be concise and really think about the context of this research. You need to be able to explain why this research has been done in order to understand it.

4.   Identify the SPECIFIC QUESTION(S)

What  exactly  are the authors trying to answer with their research? There may be multiple questions, or just one. Write them down.  If it’s the kind of research that tests one or more null hypotheses, identify it/them.

Not sure what a null hypothesis is? Go read this one  and try to identify the null hypotheses in it. Keep in mind that not every paper will test a null hypothesis.

5. Identify the approach

What are the authors going to do to answer the SPECIFIC QUESTION(S)?

6. Now read the methods section. Draw a diagram for each experiment, showing exactly what the authors did.

I mean  literally  draw it. Include as much detail as you need to fully understand the work.  As an example, here is what I drew to sort out the methods for a paper I read today ( Battaglia et al. 2013: “The first peopling of South America: New evidence from Y-chromosome haplogroup Q” ). This is much less detail than you’d probably need, because it’s a paper in my specialty and I use these methods all the time.  But if you were reading this, and didn’t happen to know what “process data with reduced-median method using Network” means, you’d need to look that up.

Image credit: author

You don’t need to understand the methods in enough detail to replicate the experiment—that’s something reviewers have to do—but you’re not ready to move on to the results until you can explain the basics of the methods to someone else.

7.   Read the results section. Write one or more paragraphs to summarize the results for each experiment, each figure, and each table. Don’t yet try to decide what the results  mean , just write down what they  are.

You’ll find that, particularly in good papers, the majority of the results are summarized in the figures and tables. Pay careful attention to them!  You may also need to go to the Supplementary Online Information file to find some of the results.

 It is at this point where difficulties can arise if statistical tests are employed in the paper and you don’t have enough of a background to understand them. I can’t teach you stats in this post, but  here , and here   are some basic resources to help you.  I STRONGLY advise you to become familiar with them.

Things to pay attention to in the results section:

• Any time the words “significant” or “non-significant” are used. These have precise statistical meanings. Read more about this  here .
• If there are graphs, do they have  error bars  on them? For certain types of studies, a lack of confidence intervals is a major red flag.
• The sample size. Has the study been conducted on 10, or 10,000 people? (For some research purposes, a sample size of 10 is sufficient, but for most studies larger is better).

8. Do the results answer the SPECIFIC QUESTION(S)? What do you think they mean?

Don’t move on until you have thought about this. It’s okay to change your mind in light of the authors’ interpretation—in fact you probably will if you’re still a beginner at this kind of analysis—but it’s a really good habit to start forming your own interpretations before you read those of others.

9. Read the conclusion/discussion/Interpretation section.

What do the authors think the results mean? Do you agree with them? Can you come up with any alternative way of interpreting them? Do the authors identify any weaknesses in their own study? Do you see any that the authors missed? (Don’t assume they’re infallible!) What do they propose to do as a next step? Do you agree with that?

10. Now, go back to the beginning and read the abstract.

Does it match what the authors said in the paper? Does it fit with your interpretation of the paper?

11. FINAL STEP:  (Don’t neglect doing this)  What do other researchers say about this paper?

Who are the (acknowledged or self-proclaimed) experts in this particular field? Do they have criticisms of the study that you haven’t thought of, or do they generally support it?

Here’s a place where I do recommend you use google! But do it last, so you are better prepared to think critically about what other people say.

(12. This step may be optional for you, depending on why you’re reading a particular paper. But for me, it’s critical! I go through the “Literature cited” section to see what other papers the authors cited. This allows me to better identify the important papers in a particular field, see if the authors cited my own papers (KIDDING!….mostly), and find sources of useful ideas or techniques.)

UPDATE: If you would like to see an example of how to read a science paper using this framework, you can find one  here .

I gratefully acknowledge Professors José Bonner and Bill Saxton for teaching me how to critically read and analyze scientific papers using this method. I’m honored to have the chance to pass along what they taught me.

I’ve written a shorter version of this guide for teachers to hand out to their classes. If you’d like a PDF, shoot me an email: jenniferraff (at) utexas (dot) edu. For further comments and additional questions on this guide, please see the Comments Section on  the original post .

This piece originally appeared on the  author’s personal blog  and is reposted with permission.

Featured image credit:  Scientists in a laboratory of the University of La Rioja  by  Urcomunicacion  (Wikimedia CC BY3.0)

Note: This article gives the views of the authors, and not the position of the LSE Impact blog, nor of the London School of Economics. Please review our  Comments Policy  if you have any concerns on posting a comment below.

Jennifer Raff (Indiana University—dual Ph.D. in genetics and bioanthropology) is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology, University of Kansas, director and Principal Investigator of the KU Laboratory of Human Population Genomics, and assistant director of KU’s Laboratory of Biological Anthropology. She is also a research affiliate with the University of Texas anthropological genetics laboratory. She is keenly interested in public outreach and scientific literacy, writing about topics in science and pseudoscience for her blog ( violentmetaphors.com ), the Huffington Post, and for the  Social Evolution Forum .

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How to read a scientific paper: a step-by-step guide

Scientific paper format

How to read a scientific paper in 3 steps, step 1: identify your motivations for reading a scientific paper, step 2: use selective reading to gain a high-level understanding of the scientific paper, step 3: read straight through to achieve a deep understanding of a scientific paper, frequently asked questions about reading a scientific paper efficiently, related articles.

A scientific paper is a complex document. Scientific papers are divided into multiple sections and frequently contain jargon and long sentences that make reading difficult. The process of reading a scientific paper to obtain information can often feel overwhelming for an early career researcher.

But the good news is that you can acquire the skill of efficiently reading a scientific paper, and you can learn how to painlessly obtain the information you need.

In this guide, we show you how to read a scientific paper step-by-step. You will learn:

• The scientific paper format
• How to identify your reasons for reading a scientific paper
• How to skim a paper
• How to achieve a deep understanding of a paper.

Using these steps for reading a scientific paper will help you:

• Obtain information efficiently
• Retain knowledge more effectively
• Allocate sufficient time to your reading task.

The steps below are the result of research into how scientists read scientific papers and our own experiences as scientists.

Firstly, how is a scientific paper structured?

The main sections are Abstract, Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion. In the table below, we describe the purpose of each component of a scientific paper.

Because the structured format of a scientific paper makes it easy to find the information you need, a common technique for reading a scientific paper is to cherry-pick sections and jump around the paper.

In a YouTube video, Dr. Amina Yonis shows this nonlinear practice for reading a scientific paper. She justifies her technique by stating that “By reading research papers like this, you are enabling yourself to have a disciplined approach, and it prevents yourself from drowning in the details before you even get a bird’s-eye view”.

Selective reading is a skill that can help you read faster and engage with the material presented. In his article on active vs. passive reading of scientific papers, cell biologist Tung-Tien Sun defines active reading as "reading with questions in mind" , searching for the answers, and focusing on the parts of the paper that answer your questions.

Therefore, reading a scientific paper from start to finish isn't always necessary to understand it. How you read the paper depends on what you need to learn. For example, oceanographer Ken Hughes suggests that you may read a scientific paper to gain awareness of a theory or field, or you may read to actively solve a problem in your research.

To successfully read a scientific paper, we advise using three strategies:

• Identify your motivations for reading a scientific paper
• Use selective reading to gain a high-level understanding of the scientific paper
• Read straight through to achieve a deep understanding of a scientific paper .

All 3 steps require you to think critically and have questions in mind.

Before you sit down to read a scientific paper, ask yourself these three questions:

• Why do I need to read this paper?
• What information am I looking for?
• Where in the paper am I most likely to find the information I need?

Is it background reading or a literature review for a research project you are currently working on? Are you getting into a new field of research? Do you wish to compare your results with the ones presented in the paper? Are you following an author’s work, and need to keep up-to-date on their current research? Are you keeping tabs on emerging methods in your field?

All of these intentions require a different reading approach.

For example, if you're delving into a new field of research, you'll want to read the introduction to gather background information and seminal references. The discussion section will also be important to understand the broader context of the findings.

If you aim to extend the work presented in a paper, and this study will be the starting point for your work, it's crucial to read the paper deeply.

If your focus is on the study design and techniques used by the authors, you'll spend most of your time reading and understanding the methods section.

Sometimes you'll need to read a paper to discuss it in your own research. This may be to compare or contrast your work with the paper's content, or to stimulate a discussion on future applications of your work.

If you are following an author’s work, a quick skim might suffice to understand how the paper fits into their overall research program.

Tip: Knowing why you want to read the paper facilitates how you will read the paper. Depending on your needs, your approach may take the form of a surface-level reading or a deep and thorough reading.

Knowing your motivations will guide your navigation through the paper because you have already identified which sections are most likely to contain the information you need. Approaching reading a paper in this way saves you time and makes the task less daunting.

➡️ Learn more about how to write a literature review

Begin by gaining an overview of the paper by following these simple steps:

• Read the title. What type of paper is it? Is it a journal article, a review, a methods paper, or a commentary?
• Read the abstract . The abstract is a summary of the study. What is the study about? What question was addressed? What methods were used? What did the authors find, and what are the key findings? What do the authors think are the implications of the work? Reading the abstract immediately tells you whether you should invest the time to read the paper fully.
• Look at the headings and subheadings, which describe the sections and subsections of the paper. The headings and subheadings outline the story of the paper.
• Skim the introduction. An introduction has a clear structure. The first paragraph is background information on the topic. If you are new to the field, you will read this closely, whereas an expert in that field will skim this section. The second component defines the gap in knowledge that the paper aims to address. What is unknown, and what research is needed? What problem needs to be solved? Here, you should find the questions that will be addressed by the study, and the goal of the research. The final paragraph summarizes how the authors address their research question, for example, what hypothesis will be tested, and what predictions the authors make. As you read, make a note of key references. By the end of the introduction, you should understand the goal of the research.
• Go to the results section, and study the figures and tables. These are the data—the meat of the study. Try to comprehend the data before reading the captions. After studying the data, read the captions. Do not expect to understand everything immediately. Remember, this is the result of many years of work. Make a note of what you do not understand. In your second reading, you will read more deeply.
• Skim the discussion. There are three components. The first part of the discussion summarizes what the authors have found, and what they think the implications of the work are. The second part discusses some (usually not all!) limitations of the study, and the final part is a concluding statement.
• Glance at the methods. Get a brief overview of the techniques used in the study. Depending on your reading goals, you may spend a lot of time on this section in subsequent readings, or a cursory reading may be sufficient.
• Summarize what the paper is about—its key take-home message—in a sentence or two. Ask yourself if you have got the information you need.
• List any terminology you may need to look up before reading the paper again.
• Scan the reference list. Make a note of papers you may need to read for background information before delving further into the paper.

Congratulations, you have completed the first reading! You now have gained a high-level perspective of the study, which will be enough for many research purposes.

Now that you have an overview of the work and you have identified what information you want to obtain, you are ready to understand the paper on a deeper level. Deep understanding is achieved in the second and subsequent readings with note-taking and active reflection. Here is a step-by-step guide.

• Active engagement with the material
• Critical thinking
• Creative thinking
• Synthesis of information
• Consolidation of information into memory.

Highlighting sentences helps you quickly scan the paper and be reminded of the key points, which is helpful when you return to the paper later.

Notes may include ideas, connections to other work, questions, comments, and references to follow up on.

There are many ways for taking notes on a paper. You can:

• Print out the paper, and write your notes in the margins.
• Annotate the paper PDF from your desktop computer, or mobile device .
• Use personal knowledge management software, like Notion , Obsidian, or Evernote, for note-taking. Notes are easy to find in a structured database and can be linked to each other.
• Use reference management tools to take notes. Having your notes stored with the scientific papers you’ve read has the benefit of keeping all your ideas in one place. Some reference managers, like Paperpile, allow you to add notes to your papers, and highlight key sentences on PDFs .

Note-taking facilitates critical thinking and helps you evaluate the evidence that the authors present. Ask yourself questions like:

• What new contribution has the study made to the literature?
• How have the authors interpreted the results? (Remember, the authors have thought about their results more deeply than anybody else.)
• What do I think the results mean?
• Are the findings well-supported?
• What factors might have affected the results, and have the authors addressed them?
• Are there alternative explanations for the results?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of the study?
• What are the broader implications of the study?
• What should be done next?

Note-taking also encourages creative thinking . Ask yourself questions like:

• What new ideas have arisen from reading the paper?
• How does it connect with your work?
• What connections to other papers can you make?
• Write a summary of the paper in your own words. This is your attempt to integrate the new knowledge you have gained with what you already know from other sources and to consolidate that information into memory. You may find that you have to go back and re-read some sections to confirm some of the details.
• Discuss the paper with others. You may find that even at this stage, there are still aspects of the paper that you are striving to understand. It is now a good time to reach out to others—peers in your program, your advisor, or even on social media. In their 10 simple rules for reading a scientific paper , Maureen Carey and coauthors suggest that participating in journal clubs, where you meet with peers to discuss interesting or important scientific papers, is a great way to clarify your understanding.
• A scientific paper can be read over many days. According to research presented in the book " Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning " by writer Peter Brown and psychology professors Henry Roediger and Mark McDaniel, "spaced practice" is more effective for retaining information than focusing on a single skill or subject until it is mastered. This involves breaking up learning into separate periods of training or studying. Applying this research to reading a scientific paper suggests that spacing out your reading by breaking the work into separate reading sessions can help you better commit the information in a paper to memory.

A dense journal article may need many readings to be understood fully. It is useful to remember that many scientific papers result from years of hard work, and the expectation of achieving a thorough understanding in one sitting must be modified accordingly. But, the process of reading a scientific paper will get easier and faster with experience.

The best way to read a scientific paper depends on your needs. Before reading the paper, identify your motivations for reading a scientific paper, and pinpoint the information you need. This will help you decide between skimming the paper and reading the paper more thoroughly.

Don’t read the paper from beginning to end. Instead, be aware of the scientific paper format. Take note of the information you need before starting to read the paper. Then skim the paper, jumping to the appropriate sections in the paper, to get the information you require.

It varies. Skimming a scientific paper may take anywhere between 15 minutes to one hour. Reading a scientific paper to obtain a deep understanding may take anywhere between 1 and 6 hours. It is not uncommon to have to read a dense paper in chunks over numerous days.

First, read the introduction to understand the main thesis and findings of the paper. Pay attention to the last paragraph of the introduction, where you can find a high-level summary of the methods and results. Next, skim the paper by jumping to the results and discussion. Then carefully read the paper from start to finish, taking notes as you read. You will need more than one reading to fully understand a dense research paper.

To read a scientific paper critically, be an active reader. Take notes, highlight important sentences, and write down questions as you read. Study the data. Take care to evaluate the evidence presented in the paper.

Evaluating Information

• Understanding Primary and Secondary Sources
• Exploring and Evaluating Popular, Trade, and Scholarly Sources

Reading a Scholarly Article

Common components of original research articles, while you read, reading strategies, reading for citations, further reading, learning objectives.

This page was created to help you:

Identify the different parts of a scholarly article

Efficiently analyze and evaluate scholarly articles for usefulness

This page will focus on reading scholarly articles — published reports on original research in the social sciences, humanities, and STEM fields. Reading and understanding this type of article can be challenging. This guide will help you develop these skills, which can be learned and improved upon with practice.

We will go over:

There are many different types of articles that may be found in scholarly journals and other academic publications. For more, see:

• Types of Information Sources

Reading a scholarly article isn’t like reading a novel, website, or newspaper article. It’s likely you won’t read and absorb it from beginning to end, all at once.

Instead, think of scholarly reading as inquiry, i.e., asking a series of questions as you do your research or read for class. Your reading should be guided by your class topic or your own research question or thesis.

For example, as you read, you might ask yourself:

• What questions does it help to answer, or what topics does it address?
• Are these relevant or useful to me?
• Does the article offer a helpful framework for understanding my topic or question (theoretical framework)?
• Do the authors use interesting or innovative methods to conduct their research that might be relevant to me?
• Does the article contain references I might consult for further information?

In Practice

Scanning and skimming are essential when reading scholarly articles, especially at the beginning stages of your research or when you have a lot of material in front of you.

Many scholarly articles are organized to help you scan and skim efficiently. The next time you need to read an article, practice scanning the following sections (where available) and skim their contents:

• The abstract: This summary provides a birds’ eye view of the article contents.
• The introduction:  What is the topic(s) of the research article? What is its main idea or question?
• The list of keywords or descriptors
• Methods: How did the author(s) go about answering their question/collecting their data?
• Section headings:  Stop and skim those sections you may find relevant.
• Figures:  Offer lots of information in quick visual format.
• The conclusion:  What are the findings and/or conclusions of this article?

Mark Up Your Text

Read with purpose.

• Scanning and skimming with a pen in hand can help to focus your reading.
• Use color for quick reference. Try highlighters or some sticky notes. Use different colors to represent different topics.
• Write in the margins, putting down thoughts and questions about the content as you read.
• Use digital markup features available in eBook platforms or third-party solutions, like Adobe Reader or Hypothes.is.

Categorize Information

Create your own informal system of organization. It doesn’t have to be complicated — start basic, and be sure it works for you.

• Jot down a few of your own keywords for each article. These keywords may correspond with important topics being addressed in class or in your research paper.  
• Write keywords on print copies or use the built-in note taking features in reference management tools like Zotero and EndNote.  
• Your keywords and system of organization may grow more complex the deeper you get into your reading.

Highlight words, terms, phrases, acronyms, etc. that are unfamiliar to you. You can highlight on the text or make a list in a notetaking program.

• Decide if the term is essential to your understanding of the article or if you can look it up later and keep scanning.

You may scan an article and discover that it isn’t what you thought it was about. Before you close the tab or delete that PDF, consider scanning the article one more time, specifically to look for citations that might be more on-target for your topic.  

You don’t need to look at every citation in the bibliography — you can look to the literature review to identify the core references that relate to your topic. Literature reviews are typically organized by subtopic within a research question or thesis. Find the paragraph or two that are closely aligned with your topic, make note of the author names, then locate those citations in the bibliography or footnote.

See the Find Articles page for what to do next:

• Find Articles

See the Citation Searching page for more on following a citation trail:

• Citation Searching
• Taking notes effectively. [blog post] Raul Pacheco-Vega, PhD
• How to read an academic paper. [video] UBCiSchool. 2013
• How to (seriously) read a scientific paper. (2016, March 21). Science | AAAS.
• How to read a paper. S. Keshav. 2007. SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev. 37, 3 (July 2007), 83–84.

This guide was designed to help you:

• << Previous: Exploring and Evaluating Popular, Trade, and Scholarly Sources
• Last Updated: Feb 16, 2024 3:55 PM
• URL: https://libguides.brown.edu/evaluate

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Open Access

Ten simple rules for reading a scientific paper

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliation Division of Infectious Diseases and International Health, Department of Medicine, University of Virginia School of Medicine, Charlottesville, Virginia, United States of America

• Maureen A. Carey, 
• Kevin L. Steiner, 
• William A. Petri Jr

Published: July 30, 2020

• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008032
• Reader Comments

Citation: Carey MA, Steiner KL, Petri WA Jr (2020) Ten simple rules for reading a scientific paper. PLoS Comput Biol 16(7): e1008032. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008032

Editor: Scott Markel, Dassault Systemes BIOVIA, UNITED STATES

Copyright: © 2020 Carey et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Funding: MAC was supported by the PhRMA Foundation's Postdoctoral Fellowship in Translational Medicine and Therapeutics and the University of Virginia's Engineering-in-Medicine seed grant, and KLS was supported by the NIH T32 Global Biothreats Training Program at the University of Virginia (AI055432). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Introduction

“There is no problem that a library card can't solve” according to author Eleanor Brown [ 1 ]. This advice is sound, probably for both life and science, but even the best tool (like the library) is most effective when accompanied by instructions and a basic understanding of how and when to use it.

For many budding scientists, the first day in a new lab setting often involves a stack of papers, an email full of links to pertinent articles, or some promise of a richer understanding so long as one reads enough of the scientific literature. However, the purpose and approach to reading a scientific article is unlike that of reading a news story, novel, or even a textbook and can initially seem unapproachable. Having good habits for reading scientific literature is key to setting oneself up for success, identifying new research questions, and filling in the gaps in one’s current understanding; developing these good habits is the first crucial step.

Advice typically centers around two main tips: read actively and read often. However, active reading, or reading with an intent to understand, is both a learned skill and a level of effort. Although there is no one best way to do this, we present 10 simple rules, relevant to novices and seasoned scientists alike, to teach our strategy for active reading based on our experience as readers and as mentors of undergraduate and graduate researchers, medical students, fellows, and early career faculty. Rules 1–5 are big picture recommendations. Rules 6–8 relate to philosophy of reading. Rules 9–10 guide the “now what?” questions one should ask after reading and how to integrate what was learned into one’s own science.

Rule 1: Pick your reading goal

What you want to get out of an article should influence your approach to reading it. Table 1 includes a handful of example intentions and how you might prioritize different parts of the same article differently based on your goals as a reader.

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008032.t001

Rule 2: Understand the author’s goal

In written communication, the reader and the writer are equally important. Both influence the final outcome: in this case, your scientific understanding! After identifying your goal, think about the author’s goal for sharing this project. This will help you interpret the data and understand the author’s interpretation of the data. However, this requires some understanding of who the author(s) are (e.g., what are their scientific interests?), the scientific field in which they work (e.g., what techniques are available in this field?), and how this paper fits into the author’s research (e.g., is this work building on an author’s longstanding project or controversial idea?). This information may be hard to glean without experience and a history of reading. But don’t let this be a discouragement to starting the process; it is by the act of reading that this experience is gained!

A good step toward understanding the goal of the author(s) is to ask yourself: What kind of article is this? Journals publish different types of articles, including methods, review, commentary, resources, and research articles as well as other types that are specific to a particular journal or groups of journals. These article types have different formatting requirements and expectations for content. Knowing the article type will help guide your evaluation of the information presented. Is the article a methods paper, presenting a new technique? Is the article a review article, intended to summarize a field or problem? Is it a commentary, intended to take a stand on a controversy or give a big picture perspective on a problem? Is it a resource article, presenting a new tool or data set for others to use? Is it a research article, written to present new data and the authors’ interpretation of those data? The type of paper, and its intended purpose, will get you on your way to understanding the author’s goal.

Rule 3: Ask six questions

When reading, ask yourself: (1) What do the author(s) want to know (motivation)? (2) What did they do (approach/methods)? (3) Why was it done that way (context within the field)? (4) What do the results show (figures and data tables)? (5) How did the author(s) interpret the results (interpretation/discussion)? (6) What should be done next? (Regarding this last question, the author(s) may provide some suggestions in the discussion, but the key is to ask yourself what you think should come next.)

Each of these questions can and should be asked about the complete work as well as each table, figure, or experiment within the paper. Early on, it can take a long time to read one article front to back, and this can be intimidating. Break down your understanding of each section of the work with these questions to make the effort more manageable.

Rule 4: Unpack each figure and table

Scientists write original research papers primarily to present new data that may change or reinforce the collective knowledge of a field. Therefore, the most important parts of this type of scientific paper are the data. Some people like to scrutinize the figures and tables (including legends) before reading any of the “main text”: because all of the important information should be obtained through the data. Others prefer to read through the results section while sequentially examining the figures and tables as they are addressed in the text. There is no correct or incorrect approach: Try both to see what works best for you. The key is making sure that one understands the presented data and how it was obtained.

For each figure, work to understand each x- and y-axes, color scheme, statistical approach (if one was used), and why the particular plotting approach was used. For each table, identify what experimental groups and variables are presented. Identify what is shown and how the data were collected. This is typically summarized in the legend or caption but often requires digging deeper into the methods: Do not be afraid to refer back to the methods section frequently to ensure a full understanding of how the presented data were obtained. Again, ask the questions in Rule 3 for each figure or panel and conclude with articulating the “take home” message.

Rule 5: Understand the formatting intentions

Just like the overall intent of the article (discussed in Rule 2), the intent of each section within a research article can guide your interpretation. Some sections are intended to be written as objective descriptions of the data (i.e., the Results section), whereas other sections are intended to present the author’s interpretation of the data. Remember though that even “objective” sections are written by and, therefore, influenced by the authors interpretations. Check out Table 2 to understand the intent of each section of a research article. When reading a specific paper, you can also refer to the journal’s website to understand the formatting intentions. The “For Authors” section of a website will have some nitty gritty information that is less relevant for the reader (like word counts) but will also summarize what the journal editors expect in each section. This will help to familiarize you with the goal of each article section.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008032.t002

Rule 6: Be critical

Published papers are not truths etched in stone. Published papers in high impact journals are not truths etched in stone. Published papers by bigwigs in the field are not truths etched in stone. Published papers that seem to agree with your own hypothesis or data are not etched in stone. Published papers that seem to refute your hypothesis or data are not etched in stone.

Science is a never-ending work in progress, and it is essential that the reader pushes back against the author’s interpretation to test the strength of their conclusions. Everyone has their own perspective and may interpret the same data in different ways. Mistakes are sometimes published, but more often these apparent errors are due to other factors such as limitations of a methodology and other limits to generalizability (selection bias, unaddressed, or unappreciated confounders). When reading a paper, it is important to consider if these factors are pertinent.

Critical thinking is a tough skill to learn but ultimately boils down to evaluating data while minimizing biases. Ask yourself: Are there other, equally likely, explanations for what is observed? In addition to paying close attention to potential biases of the study or author(s), a reader should also be alert to one’s own preceding perspective (and biases). Take time to ask oneself: Do I find this paper compelling because it affirms something I already think (or wish) is true? Or am I discounting their findings because it differs from what I expect or from my own work?

The phenomenon of a self-fulfilling prophecy, or expectancy, is well studied in the psychology literature [ 2 ] and is why many studies are conducted in a “blinded” manner [ 3 ]. It refers to the idea that a person may assume something to be true and their resultant behavior aligns to make it true. In other words, as humans and scientists, we often find exactly what we are looking for. A scientist may only test their hypotheses and fail to evaluate alternative hypotheses; perhaps, a scientist may not be aware of alternative, less biased ways to test her or his hypothesis that are typically used in different fields. Individuals with different life, academic, and work experiences may think of several alternative hypotheses, all equally supported by the data.

Rule 7: Be kind

The author(s) are human too. So, whenever possible, give them the benefit of the doubt. An author may write a phrase differently than you would, forcing you to reread the sentence to understand it. Someone in your field may neglect to cite your paper because of a reference count limit. A figure panel may be misreferenced as Supplemental Fig 3E when it is obviously Supplemental Fig 4E. While these things may be frustrating, none are an indication that the quality of work is poor. Try to avoid letting these minor things influence your evaluation and interpretation of the work.

Similarly, if you intend to share your critique with others, be extra kind. An author (especially the lead author) may invest years of their time into a single paper. Hearing a kindly phrased critique can be difficult but constructive. Hearing a rude, brusque, or mean-spirited critique can be heartbreaking, especially for young scientists or those seeking to establish their place within a field and who may worry that they do not belong.

Rule 8: Be ready to go the extra mile

To truly understand a scientific work, you often will need to look up a term, dig into the supplemental materials, or read one or more of the cited references. This process takes time. Some advisors recommend reading an article three times: The first time, simply read without the pressure of understanding or critiquing the work. For the second time, aim to understand the paper. For the third read through, take notes.

Some people engage with a paper by printing it out and writing all over it. The reader might write question marks in the margins to mark parts (s)he wants to return to, circle unfamiliar terms (and then actually look them up!), highlight or underline important statements, and draw arrows linking figures and the corresponding interpretation in the discussion. Not everyone needs a paper copy to engage in the reading process but, whatever your version of “printing it out” is, do it.

Rule 9: Talk about it

Talking about an article in a journal club or more informal environment forces active reading and participation with the material. Studies show that teaching is one of the best ways to learn and that teachers learn the material even better as the teaching task becomes more complex [ 4 – 5 ]; anecdotally, such observations inspired the phrase “to teach is to learn twice.”

Beyond formal settings such as journal clubs, lab meetings, and academic classes, discuss papers with your peers, mentors, and colleagues in person or electronically. Twitter and other social media platforms have become excellent resources for discussing papers with other scientists, the public or your nonscientist friends, or even the paper’s author(s). Describing a paper can be done at multiple levels and your description can contain all of the scientific details, only the big picture summary, or perhaps the implications for the average person in your community. All of these descriptions will solidify your understanding, while highlighting gaps in your knowledge and informing those around you.

Rule 10: Build on it

One approach we like to use for communicating how we build on the scientific literature is by starting research presentations with an image depicting a wall of Lego bricks. Each brick is labeled with the reference for a paper, and the wall highlights the body of literature on which the work is built. We describe the work and conclusions of each paper represented by a labeled brick and discuss each brick and the wall as a whole. The top brick on the wall is left blank: We aspire to build on this work and label this brick with our own work. We then delve into our own research, discoveries, and the conclusions it inspires. We finish our presentations with the image of the Legos and summarize our presentation on that empty brick.

Whether you are reading an article to understand a new topic area or to move a research project forward, effective learning requires that you integrate knowledge from multiple sources (“click” those Lego bricks together) and build upwards. Leveraging published work will enable you to build a stronger and taller structure. The first row of bricks is more stable once a second row is assembled on top of it and so on and so forth. Moreover, the Lego construction will become taller and larger if you build upon the work of others, rather than using only your own bricks.

Build on the article you read by thinking about how it connects to ideas described in other papers and within own work, implementing a technique in your own research, or attempting to challenge or support the hypothesis of the author(s) with a more extensive literature review. Integrate the techniques and scientific conclusions learned from an article into your own research or perspective in the classroom or research lab. You may find that this process strengthens your understanding, leads you toward new and unexpected interests or research questions, or returns you back to the original article with new questions and critiques of the work. All of these experiences are part of the “active reading”: process and are signs of a successful reading experience.

In summary, practice these rules to learn how to read a scientific article, keeping in mind that this process will get easier (and faster) with experience. We are firm believers that an hour in the library will save a week at the bench; this diligent practice will ultimately make you both a more knowledgeable and productive scientist. As you develop the skills to read an article, try to also foster good reading and learning habits for yourself (recommendations here: [ 6 ] and [ 7 ], respectively) and in others. Good luck and happy reading!

Acknowledgments

Thank you to the mentors, teachers, and students who have shaped our thoughts on reading, learning, and what science is all about.

• 1. Brown E. The Weird Sisters. G. P. Putnam’s Sons; 2011.
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• v.17(1); Jan-Apr 2013

Art of reading a journal article: Methodically and effectively

Rv subramanyam.

Department of Oral Pathology, Drs Sudha and Nageswara Rao Siddhartha Institute of Dental Sciences, Gannavaram, Andhra Pradesh, India

Background:

Reading scientific literature is mandatory for researchers and clinicians. With an overflow of medical and dental journals, it is essential to develop a method to choose and read the right articles.

To outline a logical and orderly approach to reading a scientific manuscript. By breaking down the task into smaller, step-by-step components, one should be able to attain the skills to read a scientific article with ease.

The reader should begin by reading the title, abstract and conclusions first. If a decision is made to read the entire article, the key elements of the article can be perused in a systematic manner effectively and efficiently. A cogent and organized method is presented to read articles published in scientific journals.

Conclusion:

One can read and appreciate a scientific manuscript if a systematic approach is followed in a simple and logical manner.

INTRODUCTION

“ We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge .” John Naisbitt

It has become essential for the clinicians, researchers, and students to read articles from scientific journals. This is not only to keep abreast of progress in the speciality concerned but also to be aware of current trends in providing optimum healthcare to the patients. Reading scientific literature is a must for students interested in research, for choosing their topics and carrying out their experiments. Scientific literature in that field will help one understand what has already been discovered and what questions remain unanswered and thus help in designing one's research project. Sackett (1981)[ 1 ] and Durbin (2009)[ 2 ] suggested various reasons why most of us read journal articles and some of these are listed in Table 1 .

Common reasons for reading journal articles

The scientific literature is burgeoning at an exponential rate. Between 1978 and 1985, nearly 272,344 articles were published annually and listed in Medline. Between 1986 and 1993, this number reached 344,303 articles per year, and between 1994 and 2001, the figure has grown to 398,778 articles per year.[ 3 ] To be updated with current knowledge, a physician practicing general medicine has to read 17 articles a day, 365 days a year.[ 4 ]

In spite of the internet rapidly gaining a strong foothold as a quick source of obtaining information, reading journal articles, whether from print or electronic media, still remains the most common way of acquiring new information for most of us.[ 2 ] Newspaper reports or novels can be read in an insouciant manner, but reading research reports and scientific articles requires concentration and meticulous approach. At present, there are 1312 dentistry journals listed in Pubmed.[ 5 ] How can one choose an article, read it purposefully, effectively, and systematically? The aim of this article is to provide an answer to this question by presenting an efficient and methodical approach to a scientific manuscript. However, the reader is informed that this paper is mainly intended for the amateur reader unaccustomed to scientific literature and not for the professional interested in critical appraisal of journal articles.

TYPES OF JOURNAL ARTICLES

Different types of papers are published in medical and dental journals. One should be aware of each kind; especially, when one is looking for a specific type of an article. Table 2 gives different categories of papers published in journals.

Types of articles published in a journal

In general, scientific literature can be primary or secondary. Reports of original research form the “primary literature”, the “core” of scientific publications. These are the articles written to present findings on new scientific discoveries or describe earlier work to acknowledge it and place new findings in the proper perspective. “Secondary literature” includes review articles, books, editorials, practice guidelines, and other forms of publication in which original research information is reviewed.[ 6 ] An article published in a peer-reviewed journal is more valued than one which is not.

An original research article should consist of the following headings: Structured abstract, introduction, methods, results, and discussion (IMRAD) and may be Randomized Control Trial (RCT), Controlled Clinical Trial (CCT), Experiment, Survey, and Case-control or Cohort study. Reviews could be non-systematic (narrative) or systematic. A narrative review is a broad overview of a topic without any specific question, more or less an update, and qualitative summary. On the other hand, a systematic review typically addresses a specific question about a topic, details the methods by which papers were identified in the literature, uses predetermined criteria for selection of papers to be included in the review, and qualitatively evaluates them. A meta-analysis is a type of systematic review in which numeric results of several separate studies are statistically combined to determine the outcome of a specific research question.[ 7 – 9 ] Some are invited reviews, requested by the Editor, from an expert in a particular field of study.

A case study is a report of a single clinical case, whereas, a case series is a description of a number of such cases. Case reports and case series are description of disease (s) generally considered rare or report of heretofore unknown or unusual findings in a well-recognized condition, unique procedure, imaging technique, diagnostic test, or treatment method. Technical notes are description of new, innovative techniques, or modifications to existing procedures. A pictorial essay is a teaching article with images and legends but has limited text. Commentary is a short article on an author's personal opinion of a specific topic and could be controversial. An editorial, written by the editor of the journal or invited, can be perspective (about articles published in that particular issue) or persuasive (arguing a specific point of view). Other articles published in a journal include letters to the editor, book reviews, conference proceedings and abstracts, and abstracts from other journals.[ 10 ]

WHAT TO READ IN A JOURNAL? – CHOOSING THE RIGHT ARTICLE

Not all research articles published are excellent, and it is pragmatic to decide if the quality of the study warrants reading of the manuscript. The first step for a reader is to choose a right article for reading, depending on one's individual requirement. The next step is to read the selected article methodically and efficiently.[ 2 ] A simple decision-making flowchart is depicted in [ Figure 1 ], which helps one to decide the type of article to select. This flowchart is meant for one who has a specific intent of choosing a particular type of article and not for one who intends to browse through a journal.

Schematic flowchart of the first step in choosing an article to read

HOW TO START READING AN ARTICLE?

“ There is an art of reading, as well as an art of thinking, and an art of writing .” Clarence Day

At first glance, a journal article might appear intimidating for some or confusing for others with its tables and graphs. Reading a research article can be a frustrating experience, especially for the one who has not mastered the art of reading scientific literature. Just like there is a method to extract a tooth or prepare a cavity, one can also learn to read research articles by following a systematic approach. Most scientific articles are organized as follows:[ 2 , 11 ]

• Title: Topic and information about the authors.
• Abstract: Brief overview of the article.
• Introduction: Background information and statement of the research hypothesis.
• Methods: Details of how the study was conducted, procedures followed, instruments used and variables measured.
• Results: All the data of the study along with figures, tables and/or graphs.
• Discussion: The interpretation of the results and implications of the study.
• References/Bibliography: Citations of sources from where the information was obtained.

Review articles do not usually follow the above pattern, unless they are systematic reviews or meta-analysis. The cardinal rule is: Never start reading an article from the beginning to the end. It is better to begin by identifying the conclusions of the study by reading the title and the abstract.[ 12 ] If the article does not have an abstract, read the conclusions or the summary at the end of the article first. After reading the abstract or conclusions, if the reader deems it is interesting or useful, then the entire article can be read [ Figure 2 ].

Decision-making flowchart to decide whether to read the chosen article or not

Like the title of a movie which attracts a filmgoer, the title of the article is the one which attracts a reader in the first place. A good title will inform the potential reader a great deal about the study to decide whether to go ahead with the paper or dismiss it. Most readers prefer titles that are descriptive and self-explanatory without having to look at the entire article to know what it is all about.[ 2 ] For example, the paper entitled “Microwave processing – A blessing for pathologists” gives an idea about the article in general to the reader. But there is no indication in the title whether it is a review article on microwave processing or an original research. If the title had been “Comparison of Microwave with Conventional Tissue Processing on quality of histological sections”, even the insouciant reader would have a better understanding of the content of the paper.

Abstract helps us determine whether we should read the entire article or not. In fact, most journals provide abstract free of cost online allowing us to decide whether we need to purchase the entire article. Most scientific journals now have a structured abstract with separate subheadings like introduction (background or hypothesis), methods, results and conclusions making it easy for a reader to identify important parts of the study quickly.[ 13 ] Moreover, there is usually a restriction about the number of words that can be included in an abstract. This makes the abstract concise enough for one to read rapidly.

The abstract can be read in a systematic way by answering certain fundamental questions like what was the study about, why and how was the study conducted, the results and their inferences. The reader should make a note of any questions that were raised while reading the abstract and be sure that answers have been found after reading the entire article.[ 12 ]

Reading the entire article

Once the reader has decided to read the entire article, one can begin with the introduction.

The purpose of the introduction is to provide the rationale for conducting the study. This section usually starts with existing knowledge and previous research of the topic under consideration. Typically, this section concludes with identification of gaps in the literature and how these gaps stimulated the researcher to design a new study.[ 12 ] A good introduction should provide proper background for the study. The aims and objectives are usually mentioned at the end of the introduction. The reader should also determine whether a research hypothesis (study hypothesis) was stated and later check whether it was answered under the discussion.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

This section gives the technical details of how the experiments were carried out. In most of the research articles, all details are rarely included but there should be enough information to understand how the study was carried out.[ 12 ] Information about the number of subjects included in the study and their categorization, sampling methods, the inclusion criteria (who can be in) and exclusion criteria (who cannot be in) and the variables chosen can be derived by reading this section. The reader should get acquainted with the procedures and equipment used for data collection and find out whether they were appropriate.

RESULTS OF THE STUDY

In this section, the researchers give details about the data collected, either in the form of figures, tables and/or graphs. Ideally, interpretation of data should not be reported in this section, though statistical analyses are presented. The reader should meticulously go through this segment of the manuscript and find out whether the results were reliable (same results over time) and valid (measure what it is supposed to measure). An important aspect is to check if all the subjects present in the beginning of the study were accounted for at the end of the study. If the answer is no, the reader should check whether any explanation was provided.

Results that were statistically significant and results that were not, must be identified. One should also observe whether a correct statistical test was employed for analysis and was the level of significance appropriate for the study. To appreciate the choice of a statistical test, one requires an understanding of the hypothesis being tested.[ 14 , 15 ] Table 3 provides a list of commonly used statistical tests used in scientific publications. Description and interpretation of these tests is beyond the scope of this paper. It is wise to remember the following advice: It is not only important to know whether a difference or association is statistically significant but also appreciate whether it is large or substantial enough to be useful clinically.[ 16 ] In other words, what is statistically significant may not be clinically significant.

Basic statistics commonly used in scientific publications

This is the most important section of the article where the research questions are answered and the meaning of analysis and interpretation of the data are presented. Usually the study results are compared with other studies, explaining in what aspects they were different or similar. Ideally, no new data should be presented under discussion and no information from other sections should be repeated.[ 2 ] In addition, this section also discusses the various strengths and limitations/shortcomings of the study, providing suggestions about areas that need additional research.

The meaning of results and their analyses, new theories or hypotheses, limitations of the study, explanation of differences and similarities with other comparable studies, and suggestions for future research are offered in this section. It is important to remember that the discussions are the authors’ interpretations and opinions and not necessarily facts.

READING THE CONCLUSION (AGAIN !)

Though conclusion part had been read at the beginning, it is prudent to read it again at the end to confirm whether what we had inferred initially is correct. If the conclusion had not made sense earlier, it may make sense after having perused through the entire article. Sometimes, the study conclusions are included in the discussion section and may not be easy to locate. The questions that can be asked under various sub-headings of an original research paper are presented as a simple questionnaire in Table 4 . It is assumed that one who is using this questionnaire has read and analyzed the abstract and then decided to read the entire article. This questionnaire does not critically analyze a scientific article. However, answers to these questions provide a systematic approach to obtain a broad overview of the manuscript, especially to a novice. If one who is new to reading articles, writing answers to these questions and taking notes will help in understanding most aspects of a research article.

Questionnaire for original research articles

“ Let us read with method, and propose to ourselves an end to which our studies may point. The use of reading is to aid us in thinking .” Edward Gibbon

It has become mandatory to read scientific literature to be well-informed of ever-expanding information and/or for better diagnosis, prognosis and therapy. Since there is an abundance of journals and articles, it is critical to develop a modus operandi for achieving a rapid, purposeful, effective and useful method to read these manuscripts. A simple but efficient and logical approach to scientific literature has been presented here for choosing articles and reading them systematically and effectively for a better understanding.

Source of Support: Nil.

Conflict of Interest: None declared.

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• CAREER COLUMN
• 07 July 2022

How to find, read and organize papers

• Maya Gosztyla 0

Maya Gosztyla is a PhD student in biomedical sciences at the University of California, San Diego.

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“I’ll read that later,” I told myself as I added yet another paper to my 100+ open browser tabs.

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How to Read Research Papers: A Cheat Sheet for Graduate Students

• August 4, 2022
• PRODUCTIVITY

It is crucial to stay on top of the scientific literature in your field of interest. This will help you shape and guide your experimental plans and keep you informed about what your competitors are working on.

To get the most out of your literature reading time, you need to learn how to read scientific papers efficiently. The problem is that we simply don’t have enough time to read new scientific papers in our results-driven world. 

It takes a great deal of time for researchers to learn how to read research papers. Unfortunately, this skill is rarely taught.

I wasted a lot of time reading unnecessary papers in the past since I didn’t have an appropriate workflow to follow. In particular, I needed a way to determine if a paper would interest me before I read it from start to finish.

So, what’s the solution?

This is where I came across the Three-pass method for reading research papers. 

Here’s what I’ve learned from using the three pass methods and what tweaks I’ve made to my workflow to make it more personalized.

Build time into your schedule 

Before you read anything, you should set aside a set amount of time to read research papers. It will be very hard to read research papers if you do not have a schedule because you will only try to read them for a week or two, and then you will feel frustrated. An organized schedule reduces procrastination significantly.

 For example, I take 30-40 minutes each weekday morning to read a research paper I come across.

After you have determined a time “only” to read research papers, you have to have a proper workflow.

Develop a workflow

For example, I follow a customized version of the popular workflow, the “Three-pass method”. 

When you are beginning, you may follow the method exactly as described, but as you get more experienced, you can make some changes down the road.

Why you shouldn’t read the entire paper at once?

Oftentimes, the papers you think are so important and that you should read every single word are actually worth only 10 minutes of your time.

Unlike reading an article about science in a blog or newspaper, reading research papers is an entirely different experience. In addition to reading the sections in a different order, you must take notes, read them several times, and probably look up other papers for details. 

It may take you a long time to read one paper at first. But that’s okay because you are investing yourself in the process.

However, you’re wasting your time if you don’t have a proper workflow. 

Oftentimes, reading a whole paper might not be necessary to get the specific information you need.

The Three-pass concept

The key idea is to read the paper in up to three passes rather than starting at the beginning and plowing through it. With each pass, you accomplish specific goals and build upon the previous one.

The first pass gives you a general idea of the paper. A second pass will allow you to understand the content of the paper, but not its details. A third pass helps you understand the paper more deeply.

The first pass (Maximum: 10 minutes)

The paper is scanned quickly in the first pass to get an overview. Also, you can decide if any more passes are needed. It should take about five to ten minutes to complete this pass.

Carefully read the title, abstract, and introduction

You should be able to tell from the title what the paper is about. In addition, it is a good idea to look at the authors and their affiliations, which may be valuable for various reasons, such as future reference, employment, guidance, and determining the reliability of the research.

The abstract should provide a high-level overview of the paper. You may ask, What are the main goals of the author(s) and what are the high-level results? There are usually some clues in the abstract about the paper’s purpose. You can think of the abstract as a marketing piece.

As you read the introduction, make sure you only focus on the topic sentences, and you can loosely focus on the other content.

What is a topic sentence?

Topic sentences introduce a paragraph by introducing the one topic that will be the focus of that paragraph. 

The structure of a paragraph should match the organization of a paper. At the paragraph level, the topic sentence gives the paper’s main idea, just as the thesis statement does at the essay level. After that, the rest of the paragraph supports the topic.

In the beginning, I read the whole paragraph, and it took me more than 30 minutes to complete the first pass. By identifying topic sentences, I have revolutionized my reading game, as I am now only reading the summary of the paragraph, saving me a lot of time during the second and third passes.

Read the section and sub-section headings, but ignore everything else 

Regarding methods and discussions, do not attempt to read even topic sentences because you are trying to decide whether this article is useful to you.

Reading the headings and subheadings is the best practice. It allows you to get a feel for the paper without taking up a lot of time.

Read the conclusions

It is standard for good writers to present the foundations of their experiment at the beginning and summarize their findings at the end of their paper.

Therefore, you are well prepared to read and understand the conclusion after reading the abstract and introduction.

Many people overlook the importance of the first pass. In adopting the three-pass method into my workflow, I realized that many papers that I thought had high relevance did not require me to spend more time reading. 

Therefore, after the first pass, I can decide not to read it further, saving me a lot of time.

Glance over the references

You can mentally check off the ones you’ve already read.

As you read through the references, you will better understand what has been studied previously in the field of research.

First pass objectives

At the end of the first pass, you should be able to answer these questions: 

• What is the  category  of this paper? Is it an analytical paper? Is it only an “introductory” paper? (if this is the case, probably, you might not want to read further, but it depends on the information you are after)or is it an argumentative research paper?
• Does the  context  of the paper serve the purpose for what you are looking for? If not, this paper might not be worth passing on to the second stage of this method.
• Does the basic logic of the paper seem to be valid? How do you comment on the  correctness  of the paper?
• What is the main  output  of the paper, or is there output at all?
• Is the paper well written? How do you comment on the  clarity  of the paper?

After the first pass, you should have a good idea whether you want to continue reading the research paper.

Maybe the paper doesn’t interest you, you don’t understand the area enough, or the authors make an incorrect assumption. 

In the first pass, you should be able to identify papers that are not related to your area of research but may be useful someday. 

You can store your paper with relevant tags in your reference manager, as discussed in the previous blog post in the  Bulletproof Literature Management System  series.

This is the third post of the four-part blog series:  The Bulletproof Literature Management System . Follow the links below to read the other posts in the series:

• How to How to find Research Papers
• How to Manage Research Papers
• How to Read Research Papers (You are here)
• How to Organize Research Papers

The second pass (Maximum: 60 minutes)

You are now ready to make a second pass through the paper if you decide it is worth reading more.

You should now begin taking some high-level notes because there will be words and ideas that are unfamiliar to you. 

Most reference managers come with an in-built PDF reader. In this case, taking notes and highlighting notes in the built-in pdf reader is the best practice. This method will prevent you from losing your notes and allow you to revise them easily.

Don’t be discouraged by everything that does not make sense. You can just mark it and move on. It is recommended that you only spend about an hour working on the paper in the second pass. 

In the second pass:

• Start with the abstract, skim through the introduction, and give the methods section a thorough look. 
• Make sure you pay close attention to the figures, diagrams, and other illustrations on the paper. By just looking at the captions of the figures and tables in a well-written paper, you can grasp 90 percent of the information. 
• It is important to pay attention to the overall methodology . There is a lot of detail in the methods section. At this point, you do not need to examine every part. 
• Read the results and discussion sections to better understand the key findings.
• Make sure you mark the relevant references in the paper so you can find them later.

Objectives of the second pass

You should be able to understand the paper’s content. Sometimes, it may be okay if you cannot comprehend some details. However, you should now be able to see the main idea of the paper. Otherwise, it might be better to rest and go through the second pass without entering the third. 

This is a good time to summarize the paper. During your reading, make sure to make notes.

After the second pass, you can: 

• Return to the paper later(If you did not understand the basic idea of the paper)
• Move onto the thirst pass.

The third pass (Maximum: four hours)

You should go to the third stage (the third pass) for a complete understanding of the paper. It may take you a few hours this time to read the paper. However, you may want to avoid reading a single paper for longer than four hours, even at the third pass.

A great deal of attention to detail is required for this pass. Every statement should be challenged, and every assumption should be identified.

By the third pass, you will be able to summarize the paper so that not only do you understand the content, but you can also comment on limitations and potential future developments.

Color coding when reading research papers

Highlighting is one way I help myself learn the material when I read research papers. It is especially helpful to highlight an article when you return to it later. 

Therefore, I use different colors for different segments. To manage my references, I use Zotero. There is an inbuilt PDF reader in Zotero. I use the highlighting colors offered by this software. The most important thing is the concept or phrase I want to color code, not the color itself.

Here is my color coding system.

• Problem statement: Violet
• Questions to ask: Red (I highlight in red where I want additional questions to be asked or if I am unfamiliar with the concept)
• Conclusions: Green (in the discussion section, authors draw conclusions based on their data. I prefer to highlight these in the discussion section rather than in the conclusion section since I can easily locate the evidence there)
• Keywords: Blue
• General highlights and notes: Yellow

Minimize distractions

Even though I’m not a morning person, I forced myself to read papers in the morning just to get rid of distractions. In order to follow through with this process (at least when you are starting out), you must have minimum to no distractions because research papers contain a great deal of highly packed information.

It doesn’t mean you can’t have fun doing it, though. Make a cup of coffee and enjoy reading!

Images courtesy : Online working vector created by storyset – www.freepik.com

Aruna Kumarasiri

Founder at Proactive Grad, Materials Engineer, Researcher, and turned author. In 2019, he started his professional carrier as a materials engineer with the continuation of his research studies. His exposure to both academic and industrial worlds has provided many opportunities for him to give back to young professionals.

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Educational resources and simple solutions for your research journey

5 Best Apps for Researchers: Apps that Every Researcher Should Know About

Today, one need not physically visit a library and take down notes on sheaves of paper (which are apt to fly about or clutter one’s workspace!). Various online tools and software applications (apps) have made our lives easier, especially the many helpful apps for researchers.

The use of apps to ease workload, manage time, or spark creativity are rapidly becoming de rigueur in all areas of work. In academia too, several apps for researchers are designed to help with daily activities, such as collecting and organizing resources, managing collaborative projects, maintaining daily and longer-term schedules, searching for and reading articles, and staying updated on multidisciplinary topics related to a study domain.

Here, I describe some of the best apps for researchers that can are available for free and can simplify both day-to-day tasks and research-related activities.

• Trello: Streamline individual and collaborative projects

Researchers need to keep track of various activities to optimize their productivity. A useful app for researchers, Trello  is a user-friendly app wherein one can create work boards for different projects and populate them with tasks. The user can assign deadlines and keep updating ongoing progress. Work boards can be shared with all team members, thereby smoothening collaborative working.

Trello offers tools to coordinate tasks among members working remotely or disparately, say, team members on the field and those in the lab. This is a particularly useful app for researchers involved in large projects, working with researchers situated across the globe. With this app you can track team projects and monitor in detail the progress of tasks under way. This can be counted among the best apps for researchers as it enables the visualization of workflows, providing team members with a comprehensive overview of a project from beginning to end. Integration with other applications allows users to access features in Gmail or other apps directly from Trello.

Key features

• Easy to use app for researchers
• Flexible and versatile
• Helps manage collaborative projects
• Evernote: Organize your thoughts and ideas

Are you still relying on Post-its and notepads? Do you jot down sudden ideas on a napkin in a coffee shop or on a scrap of paper while working in the lab? Note-taking apps like  Evernote  can help you make lists and take notes and never lose them. A handy app for researchers, Evernote helps you store all your ideas and thoughts, to-do lists, notes, and research links in one place. You can keep all these bits and bobs organized by creating separate tags and folders for different purposes.

The  Evernote web clipper  is a useful feature for saving articles, web pages, or screen grabs from the internet. You can save a page or highlights to your Evernote notebook along with any notes you want to make about that page. It allows you to sync your notes to all your devices, enabling you to organize your notes across multiple platforms. Further, this is one of the best apps for researchers because its multimedia features let you annotate images, embed files and pictures in your notes, and even record audio and video notes.

• Maintains notes, articles, and other content in one place
• Facilitates content clipping from the web
• Auto-sync across devices with this app for researchers
• R Discovery: Search Less, Read More

Researchers spend a large part of their time wading through a sea of literature, sifting out the relevant from the irrelevant.  R Discovery  is a free literature discovery app and is a great platform that lets you identify the most relevant academic research papers from top journals and publishers. This reading app for research papers covers all major disciplines in the arts and sciences.

R Discovery offers customized research reading, that is, once you set up your areas of interest, the app for research papers finds the top 3 reads and presents them in the form of a daily feed for you. Powered by AI, it learns your reading interests and finds matching relevant papers. It even provides on-the-go updates on recently published articles through notifications and email alerts making it one of the best apps for researchers. R Discovery offers a weekly roundup of the 5 latest articles and summaries of research articles from trending topics. With this intuitive app for research papers, you need not worry about a crucial article slipping through the cracks when you weren’t looking!

When you feed in key terms, the app “deep-dives” into the topics and offers articles, which you can sort by recency or relevance. It even helps you look for similar papers and bookmark important research papers. Mobile and web integration lets you read your bookmarked articles on the  R Discovery  website. What’s more, to customize your feed, you can even import your reading library from Mendeley and Zotero making this a must have app for researchers.

R Discovery can be considered a literature search and reading app for researchers everywhere that steers you in the right direction during your academic voyage!

• Curates 96+ million research articles, including over 24 million open access articles
• Intuitively provides key highlights, summaries, and roundups of research relevant to one’s field
• Integration with reference managers enables the R Discovery app for researchers to make better recommendations.

• Mendeley: Handle reference lists without getting bogged down

The thought of sorting and drawing up a reference list and formatting the in-text citations and references can make the most seasoned scholars break out into a sweat. However, useful apps for researchers like  Mendeley  take the load off these painstaking tasks and offer much more. Mendeley is a free reference management app that automatically generates bibliographies as you write. You don’t need to manually type references; Mendeley imports and organizes them in a systematic manner. The app for researchers allows you to insert citations and create reference lists in different journal formats rapidly and seamlessly. These features free up lot of time, which can be used to focus on paper or thesis writing.

Mendeley is available in both mobile and desktop formats, and researchers can conveniently read content on the go and even highlight text that they might want to return to. Researchers can export papers from the R Discovery app to Mendeley and Zotero. Once exported, they can find these papers in their libraries on ref managers. They can also connect their Mendeley and Zotero accounts with R Discovery (when they are setting up preferences on R Discovery). This will allow for this smart app for researchers to suggest topics based on the Mendeley or Zotero reading list.

• Helps annotate and organize documents
• Can be used across platforms seamlessly
• Integrates with literature discovery apps for researchers like R Discovery.
• Calm: Prevent burnout and focus on self-care

Researchers work for long hours, juggling multiple research tasks, securing funding, and dealing with stressors like dealing with harsh peer reviewer comments and article rejection. These factors can add up and affect a researcher’s mental well-being and motivation. Some  indicators can point to one’s need to focus on self-care , such as altered sleep patterns. A stressed researcher will constantly feel tired and be less efficient at work.

Calm  is a popular app for researchers looking to help reduce stress and anxiety, improve sleep quality, and aid in relaxation and self-improvement. The app provides sessions for guided meditation and breathing and masterclasses for managing stress, enhancing creativity, and much more. The use of such apps can even improve concentration and mindfulness. This is a great app for researchers to use to remain calm in the face of high work pressure, roadblocks in your experiments, and creative blocks when writing papers. A few minutes a day on such an app can help you break negative patterns. After all, a happy researcher is a productive researcher!

• Tracks a user’s basic statistics, e.g., minutes of meditation
• Sends meditation reminders
• Offers masterclasses taught by experts in the field of wellness.

Don’t worry, be “appy”!

Technological innovations like AI are constantly improving apps in terms of functions and user experience. While some apps for researchers help to ease the workload or aid in multitasking, others help in self-improvement and time management to let researchers focus better on core tasks. When possible, one should use some of these best apps for researchers to become savvier and more efficient, getting the most out of their time and effort.

R Discovery is a literature search and research reading platform that accelerates your research discovery journey by keeping you updated on the latest, most relevant scholarly content. With 250M+ research articles sourced from trusted aggregators like CrossRef, Unpaywall, PubMed, PubMed Central, Open Alex and top publishing houses like Springer Nature, JAMA, IOP, Taylor & Francis, NEJM, BMJ, Karger, SAGE, Emerald Publishing and more, R Discovery puts a world of research at your fingertips.  

Try R Discovery Prime FREE for 1 week or upgrade at just US$72 a year to access premium features that let you listen to research on the go, read in your language, collaborate with peers, auto sync with reference managers, and much more. Choose a simpler, smarter way to find and read research – Download the app and start your free 7-day trial today !  

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Being critical: a practical guide

• Reading academic articles
• Being critical
• Critical thinking
• Evaluating information
• Critical reading
• Critical writing

"Academic texts are not meant to be read through from beginning to end."

Academic literature is pitched at an ‘academic audience’ who will already have an understanding of the topic. Academic texts can be complicated and difficult to read, but you don't necessarily have to read every word of a piece of academic writing to get what you need from it. On this page we'll take a look at strategies for reading the most common form of academic literature: the academic journal article . But these strategies may also be applied to other forms of academic writing (and in some cases even to non-academic sources of information). We'll ask ourselves why we're doing the reading in the first place, before examining the typical structure(s) of an article , from abstract to conclusion , and considering the best route through . We'll also take a look at the best strategies for reading .

Journal articles

One of the most common academic sources is the journal article . Researchers publish their research in academic journals which usually cover a specific discipline. Journals used to be printed magazines but now they're mostly published online. Some journals have stronger reputations and more rigorous editorial controls than others. 

Types of article

There are all sorts of different types of journal article. The article's title might make it clear what type it is, but other aspects of the article will also give you a clue.

Research / Empirical

Results of studies or experiments, written by those who conducted them. They're built around observation or experiment, and generally start with (or at least have a prominent) methodology.

Descriptions of an individual situation in detail, identify characteristics, findings, or issues, and analyse the case using relevant methodologies or theoretical frameworks.

Summaries of other studies, identifying trends to draw broader conclusions. We look at these in more detail in our section on review articles .

Theoretical

Scholarly articles regarding abstract principles in a specific field of knowledge, not tied to empirical research or data. They may be predictive, and based upon an understanding of the field. They generally start with a background section or a literature review.

Real world techniques, workflows etc. This type of article is generally found in trade / professional journals which are aimed at a professional or practicing audience rather than an academic one.

Peer review

Most good quality journals (and even some bad ones) employ a process called peer-review whereby submitted articles are vetted by a panel of fellow experts in the field. The peer-review panel may demand extensive re-writes of an article to bring it to an acceptable standard for publication. Flaws in the methodology may be highlighted and the author will then have to address these in the text. The result should be that the published work is reliable and of a high standard, and this is usually the case (though not always, as this blog post on the problems with Peer Review explains). Many databases will let you filter to exclude work that hasn't been peer-reviewed.

Finding articles

You could read every journal that's published on your subject, but that's probably a lot of journals. Fortunately, there are databases which catalogue the contents of a selection of journals. You can search these databases to find the articles that will be of use to you.

What are we reading it for anyway?

Maybe we're reading an academic article or similar text for fun, or for our own personal enlightenment, in which case we'll probably want to savour every word of it. But more often than not there are other interests at play:

• To update your knowledge on progress in a particular area or field of study
• To find a solution to a specific problem
• To understand the causes of a particular issue, problem, or situation
• To understand certain fundamental aspects, concepts, or theories
• To inform your own research and help you select an appropriate methodology
• To find support for your own views and arguments
• To impress others
• Because the article has been assigned to you by your tutor and so you've got to read it!

Why we're reading the article will inform how we go about it. If we're after a specific piece of information we just need to find that information; there's no point reading every single word.

Ask yourself:

• Why am I reading this?
• What do I want to get out of it?
• What do I already know?
• How will I know when I have read enough?

The structure of an academic article

Broadly speaking there are two main categories of academic article: empirical and theoretical . The former tends to be associated with the sciences (including social sciences), and the latter with the arts and humanities, though there may be cases where a science or social science paper is theoretical and an arts or humanities paper is empirical.

The typical sections of an article

These are the typical sections you'll find in an academic article (obviously, these are only a guide, and headings and structures may vary in practice):

Empirical paper

Abstract — a summary of the content.

Introduction — identifies the gaps in the existing knowledge, and outlines the aims of the paper.

Methodology — explains the design of the study, and what took place.

Results — explains what the outcome of the study was.

Discussion & Conclusion — interprets the results and makes recommendations based on that interpretation.

Theoretical paper

Body — considers the background of the topic and any competing analyses.

Summary — considers how the various arguments relate.

Discussion & Conclusion — interprets the analysis and makes recommendations accordingly.

What to get from each section

Each of the sections can tell you some useful information. You don't need to read every section to get what you need.

Abstract — a good starting point for understanding the scope and outcome.

Introduction — you can generally skip an introduction, though it may help give you some context.

Methodology — pay attention to the validity of the study design – is it appropriate?

Results — have any results been ignored?

Discussion & Conclusion — is the analysis valid?

Body — has anything been missed?

Summary — are the arguments well founded?

The route through

You don't need to read every word of an article to get what you need from it. Academic articles are pretty-much always split up into sections, and these sections tend to follow a fairly consistent pattern. Skipping around these sections (rather than reading them in order) allows you to appraise the article more quickly, helping you decide whether or not you need to read any more of it.

Title & abstract

"Let's start at the very beginning / a very good place to start"

– Maria Rainer

If by 'the very beginning' Maria meant 'the title ', then yes, it is a pretty decent starting point. It will give us a clue as to the type of article we're looking at, which will help determine our next steps.

The abstract is another obvious place to begin the journey. The abstract provides a summary of the article, including the key findings, so reading an abstract is a lot quicker than reading a whole article.

But be aware that the abstract will have been written by the authors of the article, and so won’t be a neutral account of the research finding. Don’t be too accepting of what is presented: make sure you think critically about what's being said. The abstract may be glossing over certain shortcomings of the article, or may be spinning a stronger outcome than is reached in the text.

The conclusion

Skip to the end. That's where all the action is! There's not really such a thing as spoilers in academic texts, so if the butler did it it's good to know from the outset. What conclusions are the authors reaching, and do they seem relevant to what you're needing?

Like the abstract, the conclusion may reflect the writers' biases, so we can't rely on it entirely. But, as with all the steps on this journey, it may help us determine whether or not we need to spend any more time reading the article.

Moving on from there...

Your next step depends largely on discipline: for an empirical (science or social science) research paper you'll want to look at the method and results to start to look at what was actually carried out, and what happened. You can then start to think about whether the conclusion being reached is valid given the approaches taken and the observations made.

In a theoretical (arts & humanities, and some social science) paper you'll probably need to pick through the body of the article and maybe focus on the summary section.

Reading strategies

When you’re reading you don’t have to read everything with the same amount of care and attention. Sometimes you need to be able to read a text very quickly.

There are three different techniques for reading:

• Scanning — looking over material quite quickly in order to pick out specific information;
• Skimming — reading something fairly quickly to get the general idea;
• Close reading — reading something in detail.

You'll need to use a combination of these methods when you are reading an academic text: generally, you would scan to determine the scope and relevance of the piece, skim to pick out the key facts and the parts to explore further, then read more closely to understand in more detail and think critically about what is being written.

These strategies are part of your filtering strategy before deciding what to read in more depth. They will save you time in the long run as they will help you focus your time on the most relevant texts!

You might scan when you are...

• ...browsing a database for texts on a specific topic;
• ...looking for a specific word or phrase in a text;
• ...determining the relevance of an article;
• ...looking back over material to check something;
• ...first looking at an article to get an idea of its shape.

Scan-reading essentially means that you know what you are looking for. You identify the chapters or sections most relevant to you and ignore the rest. You're scanning for pieces of information that will give you a general impression of it rather than trying to understand its detailed arguments.

You're mostly on the look-out for any relevant words or phrases that will help you answer whatever task you're working on. For instance, can you spot the word "orange" in the following paragraph?

Being able to spot a word by sight is a useful skill, but it's not always straightforward. Fortunately there are things to help you. A book might have an index, which might at least get you to the right page. An electronic text will let you search for a specific word or phrase. But context will also help. It might be that the word you're looking for is surrounded by similar words, or a range of words associated with that one. I might be looking for something about colour, and see reference to pigment, light, or spectra, or specific colours being called out, like red or green. I might be looking for something about fruit and come across a sentence talking about apples, grapes and plums. Try to keep this broader context in mind as you scan the page. That way, you're never really just going to be looking for a single word or orange on its own. There will normally be other clues to follow to help guide your eye.

Approaches to scanning articles:

• Make a note of any questions you might want to answer – this will help you focus;
• Pick out any relevant information from the title and abstract – Does it look like it relates to what you're wanting? If so, carry on...
• Flick or scroll through the article to get an understanding of its structure (the headings in the article will help you with this) – Where are certain topics covered?
• Scan the text for any facts , illustrations , figures , or discussion points that may be relevant – Which parts do you need to read more carefully? Which can be read quickly?
• Look out for specific key words . You can search an electronic text for key words and phrases using Ctrl+F / Cmd+F. If your text is a book, there might even be an index to consult. In either case, clumps of results could indicate an area where that topic is being discussed at length.

Once you've scanned a text you might feel able to reject it as irrelevant, or you may need to skim-read it to get more information.

You might skim when you are...

• ...jumping to specific parts such as the introduction or conclusion;
• ...going over the whole text fairly quickly without reading every word;

Skim-reading, or speed-reading, is about reading superficially to get a gist rather than a deep understanding. You're looking to get a feel for the content and the way the topic is being discussed.

Skim-reading is easier to do if the text is in a language that's very familiar to you, because you will have more of an awareness of the conventions being employed and the parts of speech and writing that you can gloss over. Not only will there be whole sections of a text that you can pretty-much ignore, but also whole sections of paragraphs. For instance, the important sentence in this paragraph is the one right here where I announce that the important part of the paragraph might just be one sentence somewhere in the middle. The rest of the paragraph could just be a framework to hang around this point in order to stop the article from just being a list.

However, it may more often be that the important point for your purposes comes at the start of the paragraph. Very often a paragraph will declare what it's going to be about early on, and will then start to go into more detail. Maybe you'll want to do some closer reading of that detail, or maybe you won't. If the first paragraph makes it clear that this paragraph isn't going to be of much use to you, then you can probably just stop reading it. Or maybe the paragraph meanders and heads down a different route at some point in the middle. But if that's the case then it will probably end up summarising that second point towards the end of the paragraph. You might therefore want to skim-read the last sentence of a paragraph too, just in case it offers up any pithy conclusions, or indicates anything else that might've been covered in the paragraph!

For example, this paragraph is just about the 1980s TV gameshow "Treasure Hunt", which is something completely irrelevant to the topic of how to read an article. "Treasure Hunt" saw two members of the public (aided by TV newsreader Kenneth Kendall) using a library of books and tourist brochures to solve a series of five clues (provided, for the most part, by TV weather presenter Wincey Willis). These clues would generally be hidden at various tourist attractions within a specific county of the British Isles. The contestants would be in radio contact with a 'skyrunner' (Anneka Rice) who had a map and the use of a helicopter (piloted by Keith Thompson). Solving a clue would give the contestants the information they needed to direct the skyrunner (and her crew of camera operator Graham Berry and video engineer Frank Meyburgh) to the location of the next clue, and, ultimately, to the 'treasure' (a token object such as a little silver brooch). All of this was done against the clock, the contestants having only 45' to solve the clues and find the treasure. This, necessarily, required the contestants to be able to find relevant information quickly: they would have to select the right book from the shelves, and then navigate that text to find the information they needed. This, inevitably, involved a considerable amount of skim-reading. So maybe this paragraph was slightly relevant after all? No, probably not...

Skim-reading, then, is all about picking out the bits of a text that look like they need to be read, and ignoring other bits. It's about understanding the structure of a sentence or paragraph, and knowing where the important words like the verbs and nouns might be. You'll need to take in and consider the meaning of the text without reading every single word...

Approaches to skim-reading articles:

• Pick out the most relevant information from the title and abstract – What type of article is it? What are the concepts? What are the findings?;
• Scan through the article and note the headings to get an understanding of structure;
• Look more closely at the illustrations or figures ;
• Read the conclusion ;
• Read the first and last sentences in a paragraph to see whether the rest is worth reading.

After skimming, you may still decide to reject the text, or you may identify sections to read in more detail.

Close reading

You might read closely when you are...

• ...doing background reading;
• ...trying to get into a new or difficult topic;
• ...examining the discussions or data presented;
• ...following the details or the argument.

Again, close reading isn't necessarily about reading every single word of the text, but it is about reading deeply within specific sections of it to find the meaning of what the author is trying to convey. There will be parts that you will need to read more than once, as you'll need to consider the text in great detail in order to properly take in and assess what has been written.

Approaches to the close reading of articles:

• Focus on particular passages or a section of the text as a whole and read all of its content – your aim is to identify all the features of the text;
• Make notes and annotate the text as you read – note significant information and questions raised by the text;
• Re-read sections to improve understanding;
• Look up any concepts or terms that you don’t understand.

In conclusion...

Did you read every word of this page up to this point, or did you skip straight to the conclusion? Whichever approach you took, here's our summary of how to go about reading an article:

• Come up with some questions you need the text to answer – this will help you focus;
• Read the abstract to get an idea about what the article is about;
• Scan the text for signs of relevance, and to get an understanding of the scope of the article – which parts might you need to read?
• Skim through the useful parts of the article (e.g. the conclusion) to get a flavour of what's being said;
• If there are any sections of interest, read them closely ;
• Consider the validity of the research process (method, sample size, etc.) or arguments being employed;
• Make a note of what you find, and any questions the text raises.

How to read an article

Where do you start when looking at academic literature ? How can you successfully engage with the literature you find? This bitesized tutorial explores the structure of academic articles , shows where to look to check the validity of findings , and offers tips for navigating online texts.

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How To: Read an Academic Paper

To start the course, you’re going to be reading a bunch of papers, and so a good place to start is with: How do you read an academic paper? In some ways, that’s putting the cart before the horse because to read a paper, you need to find it — but we’ll assume you’re starting off using the course library, so finding something to get started with should be fine

How Not to Read an Academic Paper

This prompt might sound silly. How do you read an academic paper? Well, you start on page 1, and read to the last page, right?

You could do that , but what you’ll find is that you spend a lot of time on the far right side of the curve of diminishing returns . So, you don’t want to just start on page 1 and read to the last page. What should you do instead? To understand that, it’s important to understand a little bit about how most academic papers are organized.

How Academic Papers are Organized

Most academic papers follow something like this structure:

• Abstract: A high-level summary of the entire paper
• Introduction and Background: What the problem or question is and where it came from
• Related Work: What others have done in this space, likely specifically contextualizing why the authors’ solution is necessary
• Solution: What the authors did to address the problem or answer the question
• Methodology: How the authors evaluated their solution
• Results: The results of evaluating the solution
• Analysis: The authors’ interpretation of the results
• Conclusion: The limitations of the work and what the authors will do next

There is lots of variation there, of course. Pure research papers don’t really have a “Solution” section since they’re often not building something. If a paper was based exclusively on doing some surveys or interviews, for example, it likely would jump straight to methodology. Similarly, there are papers that don’t do much evaluation: they propose a design of some tool or theory, but the contribution is the idea itself.

Generally, though, you can map most papers onto something resembling this structure.

Intention Matters: Getting Started

What you do next depends on why you’re reading a particular paper. What you’re seeking to get out of it matters.

Early in the class, you’re probably just trying to get a high-level view of lots of work going on in a field. For that: start by reading the Abstract. Sometimes, that will be all you need from that paper. That’s ok. You may find that once you settle on an area you want to explore, you might just read a bunch of abstracts to get a view of the field.

When you’re just starting out, though, you probably want to go just a bit deeper. You want to use this paper as an anchor for further exploration. Read the Introduction next. See what problem they’re setting up and how they approach it. Then, jump to the conclusion. See what they found. Oftentimes, this is enough. Then, if you want to find more papers like this one, jump back to the related work section and see what you might want to read next. Your goal here is just to get a feel for what they did and why: once you know what a bunch of people have done and why they’ve done it, you can start to position your own work and take a deeper dive.

For the first couple weeks of this class, that’s about where you’ll stay: you want to get a broad look at what lots of people are working on and start to understand the overall trajectories of the field. You don’t need to get too far into the details of how they did stuff or how they know it worked.

Intention Matters: Zooming In

Once you’re comfortable zooming in on an area, though, your intention shifts a little bit. Now it’s less “Know what others are doing” and more “See what needs to be done”. With that change in intention comes a slight change in how you read. Now, you want to focus a little more on the Future Work and/or Limitations sections of the paper. What do the authors say still needs to be done? That could be more work to expand on the current state of the field, or it could be work to resolve limitations in the existing study. For example, imagine a tool was tested with 15 middle school students and found to be good for learning: does that hold true when tested with 150 students in a less controlled environment? Those are the kinds of things that come next.

At this point, you may also want to finally visit the methodology section, especially if there’s a paper whose conclusions you disagree with. You want to find out how they came to their conclusions, and see if there’s an alternate explanation for their results. Your follow-up work then might be to test that alternate explanation.

In any case, your goal here is to figure out exactly how your new work is going to map to the work that’s already been done: it might fill in some holes, push some boundaries, or even refute existing ideas.

So Why Is It There?

You might be wondering: if I really only need to read the introduction and conclusion, why is the rest of the stuff even there? Here, it’s important to remember that as someone doing research in these areas, you aren’t the original target audience of this publication. The target audience was the academic community in which it was published, and the goal of the paper was to convince that community that the conclusions of the paper are valid and properly scoped. The methodology, raw results, etc. are all in service of that goal: to convince the community that the paper’s conclusions are believable.

You’re welcome to read those areas, too, and come to your own conclusions, and as suggested above, if you’re working on something super-similar to what someone else has done, you probably want to do that. But for the vast majority of your reading, it’s usually sufficient to know, “This paper was selected for publication by this respected venue after a rigorous process of peer review.” That basically says, “If it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for me.”

You Can  Put the Cart Before the Horse

This entire write-up is written from the perspective of someone coming into this world with no prior ideas looking for a problem to solve. However, for many of you, you already have some ideas. You might want to build an intelligent tutoring system for your daughter’s Algebra class, or research whether bring your own technology initiatives improve learning outcomes in disadvantaged areas.

None of the above should suggest that you can’t do that. Rather, your existing ideas just give you a clearer anchor on where to start. If you already know what you’d like to work on, start with that area of the literature, and read with a particular eye toward developing your own idea. It’s a near-certainty that others have done  something like what you want to do, but they may have done it in a different domain, a different grade level, with a different technology, etc. If you already know what you want to do, then your goal for this phase of the class is to find out how to put your ideas in the context of the community, as well as to make sure you’re building off whatever lessons have already been learned.

The biggest mistake people make in this class is to assume that their ideas are totally new, and therefore they do not need to look at what others have done. This is never true. Even if your idea is very different from others, there are analogues to others’ work from which you can likely learn. And even if your idea somehow  is  totally new, you need to be able to explain what  makes it new, which requires understanding what others have done.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. We’ll talk about this more when we talk about how to find additional sources later in the week.

Research vs. Tools

You may notice much of this applies to academic research, but many of y’all are looking at developing tools or courseware. The same principles apply, however. You’re looking for what others have done in an area to get a general feel, and then you’re zooming in to your specific competitors or collaborators. So, the skillset we’re describing generally transfers. The big difference in research is that other researchers are usually far more open about reporting their results, and peer review keeps claims a bit more honest. So, developing these skills in academia is a great exercise even if you’re planning on taking a more business-oriented route: the skills are the same, but the business world is more guarded in the data it makes available.

In fact, in many ways, these skills are even more applicable to the business world. If you ever take a class on Entrepreneurship or go through a startup incubator, one of the lessons they’ll drill into your head is that if you think no one has done your idea before, then you haven’t looked hard enough. Nearly every idea has been explored; the question is always: what are you going to do better, or different?

But Don’t Take My Word For It…

Reading academic papers is a well-explored topic. Others have their own takes. If you want more on this, I recommend starting with UBC’s How to Read an Academic Paper video . It’s pretty similar to what I’ve written here, but with a more narrative visual style, so it’s a bit more approachable and digestible.

Then, I’d read Adam Ruben’s “How to read a scientific paper” , in particular his “10 Stages of Reading a Scientific Paper”. It won’t really help you that much, but it’ll reassure you that you’re not alone in finding this somewhat intimidating.

And then I’d read Elisabeth Pain’s “How to (seriously) read a scientific paper” . She asked several scientists how they approach it. I recommend this article because it also gives you a broader diversity of perspectives: maybe something else would work better for you. I’d also recommend William Griswold’s “How to Read an Engineering Research Paper” , especially for more design- and implementation-oriented papers rather than user research and testing papers (thanks to Chu for suggesting this one!).

You’ll rarely read entire papers. Instead, read just enough to get what you need. If you’re just trying to get a high-level feel for the work, read abstracts and conclusions. If you’re trying to understand the field as a whole, read the introduction and related work. If you’re trying to specifically position your work relative to a certain paper, read the methodology, analysis, future work, and limitations sections.

Next time, we’ll talk about how to find papers to read.

How To Skim Read Journal Articles

Fast-Track Your Literature Review By Focusing On Three Sections

By: Derek Jansen (MBA) | May 2020

If you’ve just started your literature review process, you’re probably sitting on a pile of scientific journal articles and research papers that are (1) lengthy and (2) written in very dense , academic language that is difficult to digest (at the best of times). It’s intimidating, for sure – and you’re probably wondering how on earth you’re going to get through it all.

You might be asking yourself some of these questions:

• Do I need to read every journal article to make sure I cover everything?
• Do I need to read every section of each article to understand it?
• If not, which sections should I focus on?

First things first, relax (I can feel your tension!). In this post, I’m going answer these questions and explain how to approach your review of the literature the smart way , so that you focus only on the most relevant literature and don’t waste time on low-value activities.

So, grab a nice hot cup of coffee (or tea, or whatever – just no beers) and let’s take a look at those questions, one at a time.

Question 1:

Do i need to read every journal article on my topic when doing my literature review.

The good news is that you don’t need to read every single journal article on your topic. Doing so would just be a waste of your time, as you’re generally looking to understand the current state of the literature – not the full history of it.

But… and this is an important but. You do need to read quite a bit to make sure that you have a comprehensive view of the current state of the literature (and of knowledge) in your area of research.

Quality trumps quantity when it comes to reviewing the literature. In other words, you need to focus on reading the journal articles that are most cited (i.e. that other academics have referenced) in relation to your topic keyword(s). You should focus on articles that are recent, relevant and well cited .

But how do I know if an article is well cited?

Thankfully, you can check the number of citations for any article really easily using Google Scholar . Just enter the article title in Google Scholar and it will show you how many citations it has – here’s an example:

In fact, Google Scholar is a great way to find the key journal articles for any keyword (topic) in general, so chances are you’ll be using this to find your journal articles in the first place. Therefore, be sure to keep an eye on citation count while you’re sourcing articles. It would also be smart to dedicate a column to it in your literature review catalogue (you can download one for free here ) so that you can quickly filter and sort by citation count.

A quick caveat – citation count is not a perfect metric for the quality of a journal article (unfortunately there is no unicorn metric that indicates quality). While its usually a good indicator of how popular an article is, it doesn’t mean the findings of the article are perfect (remember, the Kardashians are popular too – enough said). To the contrary, it could indicate that there’s a lot of controversy regarding the findings (sounds like the Kardashians again).

So, long story short – don’t be conned by citation count alone. Be sure to also pay attention the to quality of the journal each article is published in (you can check journal rank here ), and pay attention to what other articles say about any given popular article.

Need a helping hand?

Question 2:

Do i need to read the full journal journal article when doing my literature review.

Some more good news – no, you don’t need to read every single word in each journal article you review as part of your literature review. When you’re just starting your literature review, you need to get a big picture view of what each journal article is saying (in other words, the key questions and findings). Generally you can get a good feel for this by reading a few key sections in each article (we’ll get to these next).

That said (ah, there had to be a catch, right?), as you refine your literature review and establish more of a focus, you’ll need to dive deeper into the most important articles. Some articles will be central to your research – but you probably still don’t need to read them from first page to the last.

Question 3:

Which sections of each journal article should i read.

To get a big-picture view of what any article is all about, there are three sections that are very useful. These three sections generally explain both what the article is about (i.e. what questions they were trying to answer) and what the findings were (i.e. what their answers were). This is exactly what you’re looking for, so these three sections provide a great way for you to save time during your literature review.

So, let’s take a look at the three sections:

1 – The abstract (or executive summary)

The abstract (which is located right up front) provides a high-level overview of what the article is about. This is giving you the first little taste of the soup , so to speak. Generally, it will discuss what the research objectives were was and why they were important. This will give you a clear indication of how relevant the article is to your specific research, so pay close attention.

Sometimes the abstract will also discuss the findings of the article (much like a thesis abstract ), but this is not always the case (yeah, the abstract can be such a tease sometimes). If it does, it’s a bonus. But even so, you should still read the other sections, as the abstract only provides a very high-level view, and can miss out on specific nuances of the research.

2 – The introduction section

The introduction section will go into more detail about the topic being investigated and why this is important for the field of research. This will help you understand a bit more detail about what exactly they were investigating and in what context . Context is really important, so pay close attention to that.

For example, they might be investigating your exact topic, but in a country other than your own, or a different industry. In that case, you’d know that you need to pay very close attention to exactly how they undertook their research.

So, make sure you pay close attention to the introduction chapter to fully understand the focus of the research and the context in which it took place . Both will be important when it comes to writing your literature review, as you’ll need to use this information to build your arguments.

3 – The conclusion

While the introduction section tells you what the high-level questions the researchers asked, the conclusion section tells you what answers they found . This provides you with something of a shortcut to grasping the gist of the article, without reading all the dull and dry detail – yeah, it’s a little cheeky, I know. Of course, the conclusion is not going to highlight every nuance of the analysis findings, so if the article is highly relevant to your research, you should make sure to also pay close attention to the analysis findings section.

In addition to the findings of the research, the conclusion section will generally also highlight areas that require further research . In other words, they’ll outline areas that genuinely require further academic investigation (aka research gaps ). This is a gold mine for refining your topic into something highly original and well-rooted in the existing literature – just make sure that the article is recent, or someone else may have already exploited the research gap. If you’re still looking to identify a research topic, be sure to check out our video covering that here .

By reviewing these three sections of each article, you’ll save yourself a lot of time, while still getting a good understanding of what each article is saying. Keep in mind that as your literature review progresses, you focus will narrow and you’ll develop a set of core highly relevant articles, which you should sink your teeth into more deeply.

Let’s Recap

In this post, we looked at how to read academic journal articles quickly and efficiently, to save you many hours of pain while undertaking your literature review.

The key takeaways to remember are:

• You don’t need to read every single journal article covering your topic – focus on the most popular, authoritative and recent ones
• You don’t need to read every word of every article. To start, you just need to get a high-level understanding of the literature, which you can get by focusing on three key areas in each journal article.
• The three sections of each journal article to review are the abstract , the introduction and the conclusion .
• Once you’ve narrowed down your focus and have a core set of highly relevant, highly authoritative articles, you can dive deeper into them, paying closer attention to the methodology and analysis findings.

And there you have it – now go on and hammer through that pile of articles at warp speed. While you’re at it, why not also check out our other posts and videos covering research topic ideation , dissertation and thesis proposal , literature review , methodology , analysis and more.

Psst… there’s more!

This post is an extract from our bestselling short course, Literature Review Bootcamp . If you want to work smart, you don't want to miss this .

28 Comments

Thanks Derek for the tips

Reviewing the Literature can be overwhelming if you do not have the plan or the right structure to navigate the pool of information

You’re most welcome, Aletta. All the best with your literature review.

I personally have found these tips as a key to my long standing problem of reading articles. Thanks a million times

Simple and easy to read guidance… funny too

Great to hear that, Rishen 🙂

Much appreciated Derek. I already realized I could not read everything, but you confirming that has brought a lot of relief.

Great to hear that, Mazwakhe 🙂

Derek sir, I’m really happy for you.You made me to think very smart and effective way to do the review of literature.

Thank you so much.

Dear Derek, thank you for your easy and straight forward guidance,

Thanks for the interesting and informative article

You’re most welcome, Sanoon. Glad it was useful.

Thanks for the insights, I am about to start my literature review and this article as well as the other material from GradCoach will help me on the jorney.

You’re most welcome! Good luck writing your literature review

It was a great and effective information.

Thank you that was very helpful. I am taking a directed studies summer course, and I have to submit a literature review by end of August. That article was short, straight to the point and interesting 🙂 thank you Derek

You’re welcome, Emy 🙂 Good luck with your studies!

Thanks Derek. Reading this article has given me a boost because I have been so stock on how to go about my literature review.Though I know I am not meant to read the whole article.But your explanation has given me a greater insight.

Thank you very much sir for your great explanation 😄 Hopefully I’ve enough diligence and courage to start

You’re most welcome, Felicia. Good luck with your research.

thanks, it was helpful.

Thanks Derek for doing such a wonderful job of helping. Blessings Bro!

Concise and applicable, nice! what a great help. I am now doing a literature review section on my thesis, I used to waste so much time on reading articles that is not relevant back and forth.

Thank for your great help!

Hi Derek, i am busy with my research literature. I submited my 1st draft but it was way irrelevant as per comments made by my supervisor… i gave myself time to find out where i diverted until i lesson to some of your videos. As we speak now, i am starting following the guidelines and i feel confident that i am on the right track now. Thanks a lot my brother

You’re most welcome 🙂

I can’t explain my mood when I realised I had to study more than 40 articles about my study field. It was indeed a game-changer. Thank you very much, Derek. Also, Kardashian was the best example that can be used for this situation :)))

Thank you for posting this. It truly takes a load off! I’m new to Doctoral research and peer review study and “Overwhelmed” doesn’t quite sum up how I felt. This is a tremendous help!

Thank you for the advice. Question, how do one keep count of all the articles considered from starting point to narrowed down. Manually, or is there another way?

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How to Read Academic Papers Effectively: Tops Tips and Tools

Unlike books and articles, academic papers are best read in a non-chronological order. From beginner to expert, the approach you take to academic reading will differ slightly, improving as your expertise grows. In this article, we’ll share how to best approach academic reading, in an efficient way, ensuring you’re able to extract the most valuable information to your needs with the least amount of effort.

Before you start reading, it’s essential to understand what you hope to gain. If you’re a student, exploring academic papers for your modules or assignments, you’ll often be new to the subject area. In this case, it helps to note down what you’re looking to learn. Are you interested in learning more about a particular theory to critique and compare it to another? Are you practising critical reading and summarisation skills? Alternatively, as a postgraduate student or someone with more experience, you might be looking to update yourself on your field or research, or delve into a new subject area. Understanding this will help to guide your focus, and grasp what the most important takeaways are for you, beyond the core assumptions of the research. 

The First Pass

In this first pass, you’ll focus on the title, abstract, introduction, sub-headings and conclusions. This will provide an overview of the paper, and general understanding. As suggested by this article , the first pass should highlight what category the paper belongs to, and the context. For example, the paper might analyse an existing issue (category) using a particular set of theories (context). In addition, this pass should allow you to judge the correctness of their assumptions, and the paper's main contributions to the field. A paper that is well-written will provide this sense of clarity within the first pass, allowing you to judge the relevance of the paper to your needs.

The Second Pass

Now that you’ve decided the paper is relevant, it’s time to start grasping the content using the method, results and discussion. At this point, the details aren’t too important. During this pass, it’s good to look over the results and any tables, or figures to understand the general technicalities of the research. You can make sense of the author’s approach by reading the discussion and re-reading the introduction. This will help piece together the core findings, and how they were reached, alongside why this was the approach used. Depending on how familiar you are with the terminology and context, this can take up to an hour, if not longer. 

The Third Pass 

The process of the third pass will depend on what you hope to gain, but the core idea is to begin reading both critically and creatively. For someone new to the subject area, this might mean first reading further papers within the references to get a feel of the subject area, and understand the significance of the findings. Otherwise, this will be critically asking questions about the paper as you read, questioning the author's assumptions and approach, while examining their methods and results in more detail. To read creatively is to improve upon the research and re-imagine it in new ways, how would you approach the problem? What were the positives of their research? Did they take a new approach or have a well thought out analysis? Do the findings have more potential than noted by the authors? Being able to approach papers in a critical and creative way is important for connecting the dots, forming new insights and providing critical analysis in your own writing. For more guidance, see this document . 

• Skim over the complex details. It’s important to get the broad picture first. You might find terminology and concepts become clear with some context. If not, you can further explore these after the second pass to improve your understanding. 
• Be ready to dedicate the time. It’s normal to read a paper multiple times, and for the reading process to take several hours depending on your expertise and goals. For example, as someone more experienced, the first and second pass might be fairly quick but taking the time to read critically and creatively can still be a lengthy process. 
• Learn from others. Each field is slightly different, so asking for advice or clarification from those within your subject area can help you to deepen your understanding, and learn new ways to approach academic reading. You can read advice from scientists at various career stages and within different fields here . 
• Utilise digital tools. Now, technology can support us through the academic reading process, increasing efficiency when completing those first and second passes, and aiding deeper exploration during the third pass. In genei , AI powered summarisation makes getting a detailed birds-eye view easy by extracting key information, figures, and references. You can begin to read creatively and critically using the note-taking tools to summarise paragraphs into your notes, which will be accessible across multiple documents, allowing you to connect the dots. You can also make use of the question and search features, to find exactly what you need. 

For further reading, you can access the paper’s references and import them into genei to read, summarise and annotate too. Similarly, there are tools that are perfect for finding related papers, and diving deeper into various fields of research. Research Rabbit is an app that introduces a “novel way to search for papers and authors, monitor new literature, visualize research landscapes, and collaborate with colleagues”. Researcher allows you to create a personalised feed of papers, improving discovery and keeping you up to date.

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genei is an AI-powered research tool built to help make the work and research process more efficient. Our studies show genei can help improve reading speeds by up to 70%! Revolutionise your research process.

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#GradHacks: A guide to reading research papers

Reading scientific research papers can be a tricky task. It is important to ensure you not only understand the research, but to read it critically and evaluate its reliability. Here is some advice to help you efficiently read, understand and critically evaluate scientific research articles.

The Sections

Most research papers follow a similar structure and contain the following sections; abstract, introduction, methods, results, discussion and conclusion. Some articles will contain all of these sections and others will contain some of them.

This provides a high-level summary of what was researched and what the findings were.

Introduction

The introduction gives context to the research by giving information about the field and previous related research that led to this paper. It explains the purpose of the research, what is already known about the topic, the hypotheses that are being tested and how the study will help improve current understanding of the topic. It often includes brief descriptions of key phrases or concepts. Sometimes the introduction includes information about how the research will improve current understanding. However, this is often saved for the discussion and/or conclusion.

Explains how the data was collected and analysed, including how the experiments were set up and what sample, equipment and techniques were used. The statistical techniques are also explained here.

Presents the findings of the research, without bias or interpretation.

The discussion summarises the results. Here, the results are interpreted and their significance is explained. It refers back to the introduction and explains how the study answered the research question(s).

Summarises the key points and findings of the research, the significance of the findings to the field and what the authors believe should be researched in the future based on their findings.

Top tips for reading a research paper

When reading scientific research papers it is important to consider the following

Pay attention to the title

The title should tell you the main purpose of the paper. It is also good to look at the authors and their affiliations, which could be important for various reasons, including: for future reference, future employment, for guidance and for checking if the research is reliable.

Read critically

When reading a research article, don’t assume that the authors are correct. Instead, keep asking questions along the way, such as ‘is this the right way to answer this question?’, ‘did they do the right statistical analysis?’ and ‘why did they come to that conclusion?’. Taking sample size and statistical significance into consideration is important too.

Make notes as you go

Make notes in whatever way suits you best. It can be helpful to print the paper and make notes on it. Alternatively, a greener option is to make notes digitally.

Read it multiple times

Research papers contain so much information that it will require you to read it many times before you can fully understand it. Get an understanding of the general purpose of the research and the overall results first, then delve into the finer details once you already have a basic understanding.

Read references

Reading some of the references will help you gain background knowledge about the field of research and an understanding of what has been investigated previously.

Discuss the paper with someone else

Discussing the paper with someone from your lab or a different lab will show how much you understood and whether you could get more information from it if you read it again. It also helps to reinforce your memory and consolidate what you have learnt.

Steps for reading a research paper

Following the steps below will help you get the most from reading the paper.

Check the publish date

Knowing when the research was published helps you have an understanding of whether these are the most recent findings and how likely it is that further studies have taken place since.

Skim all of the sections of the paper

Make notes as you do this and look up the meanings of any words you aren’t sure of. A handy tip is to use ctrl F on the keyboard to search for the first time an acronym is mentioned if you come across it later on in a paper, as this is where it will be defined.

Read the introduction

Read this in detail to gain some background information on the topic, including what researchers have previously done in this area and why the researchers decided to do this study. Spend longer on this if you are unfamiliar with the topic.

Also, read some of the references included in the introduction if you want to know more.

Identify how this paper fits in with the field

What’s the big question that the field is trying to solve? This will help you to understand the impact of the work and why it was done.

Read the discussion

This section will give you an understanding of the findings of the paper. You may find it helpful to write notes on the main findings and write down any questions you have, so you can find out the answers when you read the rest of the paper.

Read the abstract

To get an overview of the paper. The abstract usually summarises the overall reasons for conducting the study, how the topic was investigated, major findings and a summary of the interpretations/conclusion of these findings. This is a good way to get a summary of the study before reading about it in more detail.

Look through the results and methods sections

The methods section can often be the most technical part of the paper. You will likely need to go over this section multiple times to be able to fully get to grips with the procedures and the results.

It is important to take into consideration the following factors when reading the results and methods sections:

• Sample size
• Statistical significance

Again, look up any terms you don’t understand and make a note of them.

Write a succinct summary of the research

To check your understanding, write a short summary of the research. This will also help if you are going to write about the paper later in an essay, dissertation, thesis or literature review. Use the following questions as prompts:

• What is the research investigating?
• Why did the research investigate this?
• What was found?
• Are the findings unusual or do they support other research in the field?
• What are the implications of the results?
• What experiments could be carried out to answer any further questions?

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Seeman, S., Campagnola, L., Davoudian, P., Hoggarth, A., Hage, T., Bosma-Moody, A., Baker, C., Lee, J., Mihalas, S., Teeter, C., Ko, A., Ojemann, J., Gwinn, R., Silbergold, D., Cobbs, C., Phillips, J., Lein, E., Murphy, G., Koch, C., Zeng, H., and Jarky, T. Sparse recurrent excitatory connectivity in the microcircuit of the adult mouse and human cortex. eLife (2018) doi: 10.7554/eLife.37349

Do you have any other tips for reading and critically evaluating research papers? Let us know by leaving a comment!

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Home > Blog > Using AI for Research Papers: Tips and Best AI Tools

Using AI for Research Papers: Tips and Best AI Tools

• Smodin Editorial Team
• Updated: September 24, 2024
• General Guide About Content and Writing

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing how we access information online. From insignificant ponderings to aiding essay writing, AI tools are rapidly becoming part of our day-to-day lives.  In the academic landscape, AI is also finding its place.

However, there are still some question marks about using AI for research papers and scientific writing in an academic capacity, like if you are a PhD student, for example.

This article aims to answer some key questions on whether AI tools can accurately aid in writing research papers . It will explore how you can use AI to enhance your research process and take a deep dive into the best AI tools for writing. So, let’s get right in!

How You Can Use AI When Writing Your Research Paper

AI can be incredibly useful when compiling your research paper. You can use it to save time while conducting your research, write sentences with better flow , and even use it to check that your paper is not plagiarized.

Many people nowadays use AI for their academic work . Below, we go into a bit more detail about why AI can be useful when writing a research paper.

1. Use AI To Find Relevant Research

If you are working on a complex scientific process, finding the right research papers is crucial. Traditionally, this involves hours of searching through databases. Now, an AI search engine can quickly comb through vast databases. These tools identify relevant papers based on keywords and summaries.

This saves time and helps you find the most pertinent research. AI tools like Google Scholar use machine learning to improve search accuracy. This means even if you don’t use the perfect keyword, the AI can still find relevant papers.

2. AI Helps in Understanding Academic Papers

Academic papers often contain complex jargon. AI tools can simplify this language, making papers easier to understand. They can also provide summaries of long papers. This saves time and helps you grasp the main points quickly.

Some AI tools let you interact with papers. You can ask questions and get answers in real time. This makes understanding complex topics much easier.

3. Enhance Your Academic Writing With AI

Writing a research paper involves more than just presenting data. It requires clear and concise writing. AI tools can help with grammar and style suggestions. They can also provide accurate citations. This automates proofreading and citation creation.

AI can also help with paraphrasing, making your writing more engaging. Tools like SciSpace, Copilot, and Smodin.io can assist with writing and editing, improving the overall quality of your paper.

4. Use AI To Check for Plagiarism

Academic integrity is crucial. AI tools can detect plagiarism in your writing. They compare your work to extensive databases and flag potential issues. Some tools can also detect AI-generated content. This ensures your work is original and maintains academic standards.

AI for Writing Research Papers

One major advantage of AI for writing research papers is its ability to generate content based on prompts. AI tools can help you brainstorm ideas, outline sections, and even draft entire paragraphs. This can be especially useful when you’re facing writer’s block or need to meet tight deadlines.

Moreover, AI can improve the clarity and coherence of your writing. Tools like Grammarly, Hemingway App, and Smodin.io provide real-time feedback on grammar and readability. They highlight errors and suggest improvements, ensuring your paper is polished and professional.

AI for Finding Research Papers

Using AI for finding research papers can speed up the tedious task of trawling through irrelevant studies. Traditional search engines may not always yield the most pertinent results, especially when dealing with specific or niche topics. AI-powered search engines, however, can significantly expedite this process.

AI search engines like Semantic Scholar and Connected Papers use advanced algorithms to comb through vast databases of academic papers. They can identify relevant papers based on your query, even if you don’t use the exact keywords. This semantic search capability ensures you find the most relevant papers quickly.

Additionally, AI tools can provide summaries and key insights from the papers they find. This helps you decide which papers are worth reading in full, saving you time and effort in your literature review.

AI for Summarizing Research Papers

Large language model (LLM) tools that offer AI for summarizing research papers can save you countless hours. These tools can condense long and complex papers into concise summaries, highlighting the key points and findings.

Tools like Scholarcy and Resoomer are designed to summarize academic papers efficiently. Scholarcy for instance, extracts key information such as study objectives, methods, results, and conclusions. This allows you to quickly grasp the essence of a paper without reading it in full.

Resoomer works similarly, providing brief and accurate summaries of lengthy texts. By using such tools, you can easily keep up with the latest research in your field without getting overwhelmed.

Best AI for Research Papers: Top Tools You Can Use

When looking for the best AI for research papers and scientific articles, several tools stand out. Here are a few of the top services on the market that offer AI tools to help you with the writing process:

• SciSpace: This AI platform is designed specifically for researchers. It offers a comprehensive suite of tools, including a reviewing tool for scientific papers and an AI assistant–SciSpace Copilot. It can answer questions about any PDF document and help you understand academic articles on any website.
• Litmaps: This tool helps you navigate scientific literature by creating interactive maps of articles related to a specific topic. It’s particularly useful for discovering relevant papers and identifying trends in the literature.
• EndNote: A powerful reference management tool, EndNote helps you organize your citations and references. It integrates seamlessly with word processors, allowing you to insert citations and format your bibliography with ease.
• Notion: While primarily a productivity tool, Notion’s collaborative features and AI assistant make it a valuable asset for research teams. It allows you to manage tasks, take notes, and create dynamic content, all in one place.

Top Practices for Using AI in Research

While AI offers many benefits, it’s essential to use it wisely. Here are some best practices:

• Ensure data quality and bias: AI relies on the data it is fed. Ensure your data is of high quality and free from bias. Biased data can lead to skewed results.
• Adhere to academic ethics: Maintain academic integrity. Use plagiarism detection tools and ensure your work complies with ethical standards.
• Check for AI hallucinations: Sometimes, AI can generate plausible but incorrect results. Always fact-check AI-generated content. Look for tools that provide real citations.
• Maintain human oversight: AI cannot replace human judgment. Review AI-generated content carefully. Use your expertise to ensure accuracy and relevance.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is it safe to use ai content for academic writing.

Yes, it is safe to use AI for academic writing if used responsibly. Ensure you do not copy and paste AI-generated content directly. Instead, use AI as a writing aid and focus on maintaining originality in your work.

What is the best way to incorporate AI content into your work?

To make AI-generated content more natural and avoid penalties, manually rephrase the content or use rewriting tools. This approach ensures your work remains authentic and human-like.

How can we effectively use AI for research?

Leverage AI to locate and summarize relevant research papers, assist with writing tasks, and check for plagiarism. Always review and verify AI-generated content to ensure accuracy and reliability.

Using Smodin.io To Aid Your Research Paper Writing

Using AI for research papers is becoming a great way to streamline your writing and research process. It helps find relevant papers, review literature, and enhance writing. AI tools can also automate data collection and analysis.

However, it’s essential to use AI responsibly. Ensure data quality, maintain academic integrity, and always review AI-generated content. AI tools can efficiently identify supporting or contrasting evidence for your research papers. They enhance the depth and balance of your academic work. As AI technology advances, its role in research will undoubtedly continue to grow.

Ready to enhance your research process? Discover how Smodin’s AI tools can help you summarize literature and improve your writing. Go to Smodin.io now to explore our AI-powered research tools and create research papers that will impress!

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Speaker 1: Welcome to the Academic Research Series, a partnership between University in the High School and Thomas D. Greenlee Library of Farmingdale State College. My name is Danielle Appelbaum, and I'm the Scholarly Communication Librarian at Greenlee Library. Let's get started. In this video, we'll be discussing what academic research is. By the time you complete this video, you'll be able to describe academic research as an iterative process, apply the search framework to guide the research process, and construct and refine basic keyword searches for peer-reviewed literature and academic databases. So why is academic research so intimidating? If you dread writing research papers, I don't blame you. I used to feel the same way. One of the reasons research papers are so intimidating is that the product, the final paper, gets all of the attention. However, research is as much about the process as it is about the product. But it's not a linear process. That is, you don't pick a topic, search for the sources, and then write the paper. Instead, research is iterative. That means that the process requires going back and forth through each of these stages as you write the paper. So you'll be researching in the databases as you decide what to write about. And as you start reading and writing, you may find that you have to revise your initial topic. I know that this can be really hard to envision, so I've created a handy little mnemonic for you. All you need to remember is SEARCH, which stands for Speculate. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, to speculate means, quote, In essence, it means to reflect. When you're developing a research topic for a paper, you want to make sure that you take time to consider all the possibilities. For example, what are you interested in that will also satisfy the requirements of the assignment? At this stage, you don't have to be super specific. You just need to get clear about what most interests you, and you can do that in a number of ways. First, talk to your instructor. They design the research assignment, so they can give you feedback in terms of whether or not a topic might be appropriate for the paper. You can also look at your course materials. What unit or module was most interesting to you? Why? Once we have a broad topic in mind, like electric cars or social media or genetically modified foods, we can move to the next stage, explore, to further refine our topic and start identifying some specific questions we want our paper to answer. Again, many students think that you pick the topic and then start searching for sources, but you should actually be searching as you develop your topic. Why? Well, if you're too specific right away, you might find that there's not a whole lot of information on your topic, although there might be quite a bit of information on a slightly broader version of your topic. Let me show you what I mean. We'll use Gale Academic OneFile from NovelNY, since you should have access to this database from anywhere within New York State. Here's a good example. Let's say I'm interested in researching water quality in the town of Quag. That search doesn't leave me with a whole lot of information, but if I expand my search just a tiny bit and I instead look for water quality in Suffolk County, of which Quag is a part, then I start getting a number of results. The goal of the Explorer phase is to ensure that you select a topic about which resources already exist and that you get a very broad overview of what these sources cover so that you can begin to more clearly articulate the purpose of your paper. Here's another example to show you what the process might look like. Let's say I'm really interested in electric cars, but I'm not sure where I want to go with that. I can start with a basic search for electric cars in the database. Now, don't be alarmed by the fact that we have so many results. You're not going to have to read everything in this list, but we are going to use this list to help us narrow down our area of interest. First, it's important to remember that not every researcher describes the same idea in the same way. Even the database has a way of organizing items in the database by subject, so you want to take a quick look in the subject tab to see if there are any other terms that might describe your topic equally as well. Using these terms ensures that you don't miss out on anything relevant just because you didn't use those terms in your search. For example, when I click the subject tab, I see that the database has tagged certain articles as being about electric cars or electric vehicles. I can just copy and paste these into a revised version of my search using the advanced search feature. Now that I'm thinking about similar terms, I realize that I can also use the term electric automobile as well. It's important to remember that there should be an or between each of these terms as you are telling the database that you want to see any result with electric car or electric vehicle or electric automobile or any combination of these terms. When you hit search, you'll see that you have even more results, but that's still okay. Now that we know we're using a nice variety of terms that cover our topic, we can start to narrow our search further. So next, you want to limit your search by peer-reviewed articles. Unlike newspaper and magazine articles, which go through a basic review process, peer-reviewed journal articles go through a process in which experts in the researcher's field evaluate the article. Many articles are rejected during this process, and those that are accepted usually require several revisions. This rigorous vetting process serves to weed out questionable research while also improving even further the quality of publishable work. If you'd like to know more about this process, see the description box below. I'll share a link to one of my favorite videos that describes peer-review in just three minutes. Next, you want to limit by publication date. The age of materials available in a database can be decades or sometimes even centuries old, so we're going to change the date range from 2017 to 2022 so that we're only looking at the information published in the last five years. Now, we still have a lot of results, but that's okay because now you're going to start browsing and revising your exploratory search strategically. So we already know that we want to focus on electric vehicles, but now we're going to review some of the results and consider specific aspects that we can focus on within the topic of electric vehicles. It really helps if you have a pen and paper handy to start mapping out your options. I'll show you what my map looks like on the right side of the screen. So as I scroll through and I review titles and I open up articles to see abstracts, which are just short summaries about what the article covers, I see that I could write about consumer's intention to purchase electric vehicles, safety in electric vehicles, electric vehicles and efficiency, electric vehicles and the environment, emissions in electric vehicles, repair and maintenance of electric vehicles, and so much more. Articulate. Now, one thing that's very important to remember at this stage as you explore strategically is the type of research paper you are undertaking. Are you analyzing a topic or are you making an argument about a particular issue? This impacts how you articulate the purpose of your paper, the research questions you formulate, and the preliminary outline you create for your paper. All of this in turn impacts how you search for and select information to answer those questions. I'll show you what I mean. For example, as we're browsing through all of our results on electric cars, we might decide that we're interested in the adoption of electric vehicles. If the goal is to write an argumentative or persuasive essay, our thesis statement might look something like this. The government should provide incentives to increase the adoption of electric vehicles because X, Y, and Z. But if we're writing an analytical paper on the same topic, our thesis might look something like this. While a number of factors contribute to the adoption of electric vehicles, X, Y, and Z significantly impact consumer's intention to purchase and use electric vehicles. How we set up our thesis statement subsequently impacts how we set up our outline. Now, if you're thinking, I don't have to do an outline for this project, so why would I want to do even more work? Hear me out. Setting up an outline before you start writing your paper is a small investment in your time that will yield huge results. And by huge results, I mean you're actually going to write a better paper in less time than if you didn't set up an outline. First, the outline is the roadmap to your paper. Think about it this way. If you're trying to get somewhere and you've never been there before, you don't just hop in the car or on a bus or on a train and hope to get there. If you're like me, you probably open up Google Maps where you see that there are options for getting where you need to go. So you pick the route that works for you, given your destination and your resources. The same is true when writing a research paper. Your goal is to get from point A, your thesis statement, to point Z, your conclusion, in the most efficient, logical way possible. In other words, you don't want to set out for the library and end up at the hardware store. Likewise, you don't want to construct your paper in a way that might lead your reader to a destination other than the analysis or argument you set up in your thesis statement. You want the reader of your paper to feel like the path they took to your conclusion made sense, that there weren't any unexpected stops that prolonged the trip, and if there were, that they were justified. If you have an outline, you know exactly the points you need to hit in order to get where you're going, without taking any unnecessary detours while, at the same time, you're able to see alternate routes in the event that your initial route doesn't work out as planned. Here's what I mean. So let's say I go with the analytical paper. My thesis statement might look something like this. While a number of factors contribute to the adoption of electric vehicles, X, Y, and Z significantly impact consumers' intention to purchase and use electric vehicles. I know from my preliminary search that there are articles that discuss why people decide to switch from traditional vehicles to electric cars. So the overarching question I'm trying to answer with my thesis statement is based on the literature. I'm asking, what makes consumers adopt used electric vehicles? And by extension, I'm also asking the question, what makes consumers reject electric vehicles? At this point, I don't even need to know the details to set up my outline. I can just create placeholders as I start to review my exploratory search. So let me show you. Here's our exploratory search that we created earlier for locating items about consumers' intention to purchase vehicles. As I review the abstract for my results, I start to see patterns that I can use to fill in the blanks in my preliminary outline. Now, I gave myself five blanks to fill in, but depending on your topic, you might need a few more. Here, I'm pretty satisfied with the factors I identified from my search list, but I can always leave an extra placeholder there just in case I find something along the way that doesn't fit into the factors I've already identified. With our basic outline in place, we can now revisit and revise our exploratory search to address each of these areas. Revisit and revise your exploratory search and construct and critique your paper. This is where we get to the R and C in search. R stands for revisiting and revising your exploratory search. C stands for constructing and critiquing. Contrary to what most students believe, you don't just find your sources, read them all, and then write the paper. You read and incorporate the sources into your outline as you go, returning to and revising your search for additional sources as needed. Pretty soon, your outline starts to morph into your paper. Here's how this works. When I'm writing a paper, I find it helpful to convert my bullet points to questions. Why a question? If I have just a general area in a paper to address, it's really easy for me to get off topic. But if I convert it into a question, it's a lot easier for me to see whether or not my evidence constitutes a sufficient answer to the question. If it does, I can just move on to the next point. So, for example, if I start out with consumer attitudes, beliefs, and perceptions about electric vehicles influence consumers' adoption and use of electric vehicles, that'll become how do attitudes, beliefs, and perceptions about electric vehicles influence consumers' adoption and use of electric vehicles. We'll do this with each aspect that we're looking at in our paper. Now that you have specific research questions, you can target your search even further. Here's a quick overview of how to convert your research questions into new searches. Let's take the question, how does the availability of infrastructure influence consumers' adoption and use of electric vehicles? In most databases, we can't just type this in as is because it'll confuse the database. So we're going to convert it into a search, which means that we're going to identify all the possible keywords to help us find relevant information. Sometimes it's helpful to start with a mind map so that we can group similar terms together. The idea here is to use keywords that represent the most important concepts and leave out articles, prepositions, and verbs. This includes words like the and of, which actually confuses the database. Now if you can't think of similar terms off the top of your head, don't worry. Sometimes there really is only one way to describe something. But here's something I do to help myself out. I use a thesaurus. I'll share a link to my favorite online thesaurus in the description box below. Now let's start with infrastructure. Infrastructure is a great keyword, but we might also include keywords that identify specific types of infrastructure, such as charging stations. Next, we can move on to adoption, use, rejection. These are great terms too, but we could also use purchase intention, intention to use, uptake. Finally, we have electric cars. Again, we could use this term, but we could also use electric vehicles or electric automobiles. Now here's the trick. All of your terms that appear in the same bubble on your map go in the same field, and each gets an or between it. This tells the database that you want results in which any of those terms appear. So let's take care of this part of your search first. So in field one, we're going to put infrastructure or charging stations. In field two, we'll put adoption or use or purchase intention or intention to use or uptake. In field three, we'll put electric cars or electric vehicles or electric automobiles. Great. Now we're going to make sure that the dropdown menus between each of these fields are set to and. This tells the database that you're looking for any result in which any term from the first field appears with any term or combination of terms from the second and third fields. Now you've got a great targeted search to start with just for this section of your paper. So as you read articles from this search, you start writing this section of your paper. You may even find that some articles touch on multiple areas that you're covering because you already have an outline. You can include that information in other sections as you're writing up this section. For each question, you'll do the same thing. Use your research question to create a search and then begin filling out that section of your outline as you read each source. As I mentioned in another video in this series, don't forget to cite your sources as you incorporate them into your outline. Luckily, most databases have a citation generator for your references or works cited list. In Academic OneFile, you can click the cite button and generate a citation for your works cited list or references page. You can then use this information to create an in-text citation that appears in the body of your paper. Not familiar with citing? Check out Greenlee Library's citation videos page. We provide up-to-date guidance on citing your sources in both MLA and APA formats. Finally, hone and hand over. As you cycle back and forth through visiting and revising your exploratory search and constructing your paper, you'll be amazed at how quickly your outline starts to morph into the first draft of your paper. This is the point at which you want to focus on honing or polishing up your existing draft. While there are many ways of doing this, I suggest proofreading your first draft with an eye to polishing up one element at a time. It might be tempting to do a first read and correct spelling, punctuation, and typographical errors, but I suggest starting out with the elements that are likely to require the most significant revision, the organization of your paper. As you read through your paper, ask yourself, does the way in which I've structured my evidence and examples support my thesis? Does the evidence I've selected support the claims or observations I'm making? For example, let's say you decided to go with a persuasive paper in which you argue that the government should invest in infrastructure and financial incentives to increase the use of electric vehicles in order to reduce emissions produced by traditional vehicles. Now let's say you're making the arguments that emissions are harmful and electric vehicles reduce emissions, therefore the government should invest in infrastructure and financial incentives to increase the use of electric vehicles in order to reduce the use of vehicles that produce harmful emissions. But this isn't as strong of an argument as it could be because it's not connecting the evidence with the solution. Someone might look at this argument and say, well, maybe people just don't realize how bad emissions are. Once they realize the problem, they'll choose to purchase electric vehicles on their own. Maybe government intervention isn't the solution. Maybe a public awareness campaign is a better solution. Whether you're arguing for a course of action or trying to unpack the cause and effect of a situation, it's likely that there will be competing solutions and explanations. So to address this gap, we need to cycle back through our construct critique stage and revisit our searches for more information. Now there's more than one way to make a stronger logical connection between the problem and the solution, but I'm going to show you one example of how you might strengthen the logical connection. But first, a little disclaimer. This is just an example related to the organization of an argument or analysis, but the actual points that I'm using as an example are not based on research. If you're researching this topic, you're going to need to do the review and create your own outline. So let's take a look at the revised outline. Instead of just saying emissions are harmful, so the government should incentivize reducing them through supporting the adoption of electric vehicles, we've now connected the evidence to why government support is necessary in solving this particular problem. Consumers know that emissions are harmful, but still choose traditional vehicles because of cost and convenience. Therefore, government intervention, which can reduce cost and improve the convenience of owning an electric car, is a viable solution. When you're proofreading the mechanics of your paper, it's always helpful to have someone act as a reviewer. You could ask your instructor to review a draft of your paper, you could have a friend review a draft of your paper, or if you're enrolled in a college or university, you might even have a writing center available to you in person or online where you can get feedback on your writing. And finally, once you've received your feedback and made your final revisions, you are ready to hand over that paper. As much as I love writing a good research paper, I'll admit this is usually my favorite stage in the process. Thanks for watching this video. I hope search has helped you to better understand the research process. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to reach out using the Ask a Librarian form linked in the description below.