How to quickly read a scientific paper
I know how it’s difficult to take an interesting paper and read it, generally it’s a hard process because read an article is not like read a book or a textbook. That’s ask a domain competence and a good expertise in the field which the article is written.
After years away from scientific literature it is time to come back to research. But, how to quickly read a large volume of scientific articles ? I searched through the many posts on the internet and asked my friends researchers.
Most of the articles respond to the Introduction Methods Results Discussion (IMRD) nomenclature (Purugganan & Hewitt, 2004). They are also composed of an abstract, a conclusion and a table of references (Pain, 2016).
However, reading an article is not done in this order. An article is complex, uses a very technical vocabulary and develops a sophisticated methodology (Northcentral University, 2019). To better understand the difficulty and technical content of an article, a quick and effective method is the Skim and Take notes method (Purugganan & Hewitt, 2004).
Here, I share the best tips that work for me:
1- Read the abstract
a. What was done and what was found?
b. Does the author provide specific results? Are they relevant?
2- Read the discussion and/or conclusion
a. Summarizes the important results
b. Give reasons for the conclusion
c. Questions: Do you agree? Are the results useful?
3- Read the introduction
a. Explanation on the motivations and importance of research
b. Provided a state of the art work on the domain
c. Questions: Do you understand the state of the art? Do you need to explore the references to get more information?
4- Read the results
a. Provide the data used to carry out the study and can help you in your own research
b. Contains figures and tables for a simple and effective vision of the results
c. Questions: Figures — Do you understand the axes use? Their units? Do the curves make sense?
5- Read the methods
a. By far the most complex part because it contains the details, theory and explanations of the experiment or algorithm developed
b. Question: Can you replicate the experiment or the algorithm?
6- The references part depends on the publication journal but generally provides:
a. Authors (year of publication); Title (optional); Journal title (or conference), Volume (issue): pages x-y
Throughout reading it is important to take notes and ask yourself questions (Hamer, 2018) as follows:
• What specific scientific problem does this research address? Why is it important?
• Is the method used good? Is it the best?
• What are the specific results? Can I summarize them in one or two sentences?
• Are the results supported by convincing evidence?
• Is there another interpretation of the data that the author did not address?
• How are the results new? Unique? or unusual compared to those present in the field?
References
Hamer, A. (2018, 08 03). How to Read a Scientific Paper in 5 Steps. Consulted 2019–10–22, on :
https://curiosity.com/
https://curiosity.com/topics/how-to-read-a-scientific-paper-in-5-steps-curiosity/
Northcentral University, L. (2019). Reading a Scientific Article. Read on https://ncu.libguides.com/
https://ncu.libguides.com/researchprocess/readingscientificarticle
Pain, E. (2016, 03 21). How to (seriously) read a scientific paper. Read on https://www.sciencemag.org/ https://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2016/03/how-seriously-read-scientific-paper
Purugganan, M., & Hewitt, J. (2004). How to Read a Scientific Article. Read on https://www.owlnet.rice.edu/ https://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~cainproj/courses/HowToReadSciArticle.pdf
