The Scientist’s Favorite Pastime: How to Read a Research Paper
Research papers are information-dense, jargon packed, and stoic — making them uninviting. Do the authors not want their papers to be read? Are scientists tucked away in their offices and laboratories, hiding their knowledge from us, silly peasants, so we can never escape our savage ways? Dooming us to a life of ignorance? Never freeing us from Plato’s cave where our reality is just the shadow of the real world?
Naaah dawg.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Research papers are the way they are because they aren’t meant for casual reading. They’re meant for other professionals in the field. A survey of Nature’s News and Views, a blend of formal scientific literature and journalistic news, found that many readers struggle with unfamiliar jargon and concepts even in closely-related disciplines.
So, it comes as no surprise that the novice reader would want some advice on tackling papers.
Reading a Paper
Now, here are the four secrets researchers have been hiding from you! Jokes. I’ll discuss how to go through a paper, take useful notes, and introduce reference management software.
1. Initial Skim
You’ve found an interesting title! First review the abstract. If the paper doesn’t seem relevant to your study, proceed no further.
Otherwise, skim the paper while paying special attention to headings and sub-headings to identify the main topics. Identify, define, and learn any new terms and concepts. This will minimize the number of times you interrupt your main read to find additional information.
2. Main Read
Introduction
The introduction provides the essential background on the topic, and the final paragraph(s) state the rationale, hypotheses, and questions of a study. Normally, there’ll be a short bit on how the questions will be explored.
If you know the field well, skip to the last paragraphs, and just read those. Otherwise, consider reading the entire section in depth because it will provide plenty of details that may come in handy in understanding the rest of the paper.
Methods and Materials
You can often skip the methods and materials section. It’s a very detailed description of exactly what the researchers did and how the study was carried out. For the most part, the methods and materials are there to ensure the reproducibility of the study. It also allows for others to identify the limitations and catch potential flaws of the work.
If you’re writing a literature review, dissertation, or leading paper discussions you might read the methods and materials rigorously. For essays and exams, just skip this section, and hope whoever reviewed this paper did their due diligence.
Results
This is the most important section of a paper. Read through the results and pay attention to the figures. Ensure you understand what the figures are showing and what these results mean in the big scheme of things.
You should keep two important points in mind. First, the authors put a lot of effort into figures because they want you to notice them. Second, while the results are unbiased, there can be several ways to biologically contextualize them.
Discussion
The discussion puts the results in a biological context. In other words, it provides the why. Limitations of the work, changes in understanding the topic, and future directions for research are discussed.
You can learn a lot from reading the discussion. It’ll compare the study with previous work and bring in other studies. Always read it!
3. Taking Notes
By now, you should be familiar with the main findings and layout of the paper. Summarizing the paper forces you to address any remaining gaps in knowledge. It also helps you retain the information (especially if you do it by hand) and you can refer to it later. Here are some tips on how to successfully summarize:
- If new to a subject, write 3–5 sentences on the background of the topic and 1–2 sentences on the aims and/or hypotheses — feel free to skip notes on the background if you’re comfortable with the topic
- Detail each major finding in 1–2 sentences
- For the discussion, write a few sentences putting the results into a biological context and noting other eye-catching statements.
Re-read the abstract. Hopefully, your summary will read like a fleshed-out, contextualized abstract. If you find some major differences between the two, you may have misinterpreted some key points — warranting a re-read.
The introduction and discussion are great sites to find your next read. I’d recommend jotting down in-text citations of some interesting work.
4. References
Finally, we arrive at the most exciting part of a paper. The study’s Eiffel Tower. Its Mona Lisa. Its Hope Diamond. The references.
Don’t read it.
You’ll only come here to find the name of a cited paper. Sometimes I’ll quickly glance at the titles hoping that something will catch my eye, but normally I’ll just look for other papers using Google Scholar or Web of Science.
Reference Management Software
I know some of you are trembling in excitement now. Limbs shaking, drooling waterfalls, fantasizing about the crazy paper reading bender you’re about to embark on. Chill for a sec.
Hear me out on reference management software (e.g. Mendeley, Zotero, Endnote, etc), they provide:
- Storing and organizing references
- Generating citations and bibliographies in your recommended style
- Sometimes allow in-software annotation and cloud backups
If you upload a paper PDF they’ll automatically try to create a citation for you. But the software struggles with badly formatted PDFs so sometimes you’ll have to fill in the information yourself. Some journal libraries, like PubMed, even allow you to import the citations of hosted papers. You could also just copy a citation from a bibliography. However, be aware that it may be cited in a style different from the one you’re using!
Expect anything from half-an-hour to an entire evening when digesting papers. They seem unapproachable on the surface, but deep down, they’re filled with the hard work of scientists who just want their work known.
