Have you read or heard anything on this subject that confirms or challenges the evidence? 2. You may also need to carefully read a paper if you are asked to review it, or if it is relevant to your own research. How to read a scientific paper quick tutorial on reading scientific papers how to read a paper august 2, 2013 s. Research papers i read was on the psychometrics of the beck depression inventory. These notes are intended to help you develop your approach to the way that you read an academic article for study purposes, ie as part of your studies for your degree. 1983 accounting, budgeting and control systems in their organizational context: theoretical and empirical perspectives , in accounting, organizations and society. You should download and print out a copy it is not really appropriate to attempt to read from a computer screen as you will need to move quickly through the article whilst also following the discussion here.

Many students find difficulty in reading academic articles such as the one by flamholtz. They tend to complain that: it's too difficult i lose track of what the author is saying i get so far 1 or 2 pages then find i can't make any sense of it i find i have to keep going back over stuff i've just read because i can't see what the author is saying after a couple of pages i lose interest one major reason for such problems is that students attempt to read the article in the wrong way. they try to read it as if it were a short story, or novel or newspaper report eg on a soccer match, or about the latest troubles of some celebrity or other.

So:

doctoral student mdash north carolina state university

trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock. Mdash ben hecht

february 15, 2012

graduate students must learn to read academic papers, but in virtually all cases, these same students are not formally taught how to best read academic papers. The process of learning how to read academic papers properly can not only be painful, but also waste quite a bit of time. Here are my quick tips on reading papers of all stripes: start with the introduction and conclusion: this is the fastest way to determine the problem statement and the approach taken to the problem by the authors. Scan the paper and determine the purpose, structure, and direction before reading for a detailed understanding. Once you know the general point purpose , the outline structure , and the author's slant on a topic direction then all the details are much easier to place in the correct context.

Thus, if you find an idea confusing on your first pass reading through a paper, you may know not to worry about it because it is described in detail in a future section. Do not read every single word! there are bound to be words or phrases that trip you up as you read. If you take the time to continually re read a word, phrase, or paragraph until you completely understand it, then you will end up wasting quite a bit of time. Often, if you simply plow past the part you don't understand, the meaning will be become clear in the next paragraph or section. Note the part that you found confusing and return to it later to see if the rest of the paper made it clear.

After you have read the paper, immediately attempt to identify the main point, the strengths, and the weaknesses. If you start pondering the implications of the paper before you have clearly identified the main point, strengths, and weaknesses as the author presented them. Then you will likely have trouble separating your deeper opinions on the paper from the basic elements of the paper. Although these resources focus on scientific papers, i have found many of the same techniques to be useful when reading law review articles and policy statements, which are also highly structured. Each of these resources provides a list of additional resources and can serve as a great place to get started.

Over at tor.com, jo walton is surprised that people skim over boring bits of novels. While she explicitly excludes non fiction from her discussion, this immediately made me think of timothy burkes how to read in college. Which offers tips to prospective humanities and social science majors on how to most effectively skim through huge reading assignments for the information thats really important. Ive been doing more reading of journal articles lately than i have in a while, though, and it occurs to me that similar skills come into play in the sciences, so i thought i would provide a quick guide for the most effective way to skim a scientific paper for the information you really need.

This is, as most of my posts are, primarily applicable to experimental papers in physics, but ill try to make it as general as possible. The first and most important point is to know what youre looking for. Different bits of information are found in different places and in different forms, so what youre looking for will determine where you look, and how you find it. For example, if youre just trying to get a general sense of what a given paper is about, its often enough to read only the introduction and conclusion.