why read research papers

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?

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.

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.

Researchers must read papers for several reasons: to re-view them for a conference or a class, to keep current in their eld, or for a literature survey of a new eld. A typi-cal researcher will likely spend hundreds of hours every year reading papers. Learning to e ciently read a paper is a critical but rarely taught skill.

Journal articles are the academic's stock in trade, the basic means of communicating research findings to an audience of one’s peers. That holds true across the disciplinary spectrum, so no matter where you land as a concentrator, you can expect to rely on them heavily.

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.

Effectively reading scholarly research is an acquired skill that involves attention to detail and an ability to comprehend complex ideas, data, and theoretical concepts in a way that applies logically to the research problem you are investigating. Here are some specific reading strategies to consider.

Read critically: Reading a research paper must be a critical process. You should not assume that the authors are always correct. Instead, be suspicious. Critical reading involves asking appropriate questions. If the authors attempt to solve a problem, are they solving the right problem?

Here is some advice to help you efficiently read, understand and critically evaluate scientific research articles. Most research papers follow a similar structure and contain the following sections; abstract, introduction, methods, results, discussion and conclusion.

We’ll learn how to pick the right papers for you, figure out what they’re saying, and make sense of the tricky parts. We’ll also explore how to understand why the research is important, have good conversations about it, and develop skills that make reading these papers feel easier.