How to effectively read a Research Article
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Reading a research article is an art. Even though we spend quite a good amount of time doing that, but no one really teaches the approach that we should abapt. And the irony is, there are actually some standard and optimal ways of reading a research paper.
The approach ‘three pass’ discussed below, coined by a Stanford prof. makes the reading effective and time saving.
The complete reading approach is divided into three major passes. These passes are:
pass first: you do a quick read of the abstract, introduction, conclusions and headings.
pass second: you do a critical read of the paper, while ignoring the proofs and other complexities.
pass third: you virtually validate the complete paper by making the same assumptions and analysis.
First pass
In phase one, all you have to do is to hover over the complete paper. By doing so, you gain the bird-eye view of the paper’s type and the reasearch area that it is focused on. The things that you need to read during the first pass are:
Title, abstract, introduction: First read the title of the research paper. Then, do a quick reading of the abstract and the introduction.
Heading and subheadings: Just read the headings and the subheadings of the paper, without reading what’s inside those headings and subheadings.
Conclusions: Now, simply go through the conclusion section of the paper.
References: Just skim through the references to find any relevant paper that you have already read.
The first pass helps to tell the type or category, context, key findings and contributions of the paper.
After the first pass, you get sufficient information to decide whether to read the paper in depth or not.
This is also the stage, where most of the papers are rejected by the reviewers.
Second pass
Since, you find the paper to be read indepth, you go for the second pass. In this pass, you read the paper critically but, ignoring any proofs or complexities.
While going through the second pass, you should:
- Read sections: Read all the sections of the papers thoroughly.
- Deconstruct the figures: Try to interpret the figures without reading the captions of those images. And then, read the captions and see what are they saying.
At the end of this pass, you should be able to summarize the content of the paper including the findings and theirs evidence. Even after the end of the third pass there is possibility that you still feel that you haven’t got the grasp of the paper. If that happens then you go for the third pass.
Third pass
Now, to fully understand any paper you can do a third pass. The whole idea behind this pass is to virtually validate the paper. To do that you consider the assumptions as taken in the paper and re-evluate the results based on the method discussed in the paper. You question and validate the output of the paper and by doing so you try to understand the whole idea behind that research paper.