By Christina Barnes
A lot of the time, there are things included in papers that are more a formality required by an academic journal or by the industry. Even the authors who wrote the papers are aware that not every word they write is 100% essential to the paper, so don’t fall for this trap!
Here are some hacks to make it through one of these papers:
Plan it Out!
If you’re reading a Social Science research paper, first start with the abstract or the very first part of the introduction. This will give you an idea of what the paper is going to be about and what to expect. Make sure you know what the research question is!
Then, jump ahead to the methods section. My rationale here is that it is impossible to pull something of value from an article if you don’t understand what the researchers did to get their data. Once you understand what happened, you can circle back to why they did it and skim the intro. Here you’ll be looking for key words like “Similarly”, “In contrast”, and other transitional words and phrases to find trends in the literature.
Next will be the discussion part of the paper, which you can skim through. A lot of this will be a repeat, so look for general findings and conclusions. The discussion portion tells you everything that’s in the results section, so if you’re like me and you are not numbers-oriented, skip that section and only use the results to pull specific numbers if you need them. Finally, wrap it all up with the conclusion and you’re done!
Why am I Reading this?
It is important to remember that your own motivations can actually be a good strategy for figuring out where the important information is in a paper. If you’re reading something that might relate to a project you’re working on, spend more time on the introduction of the paper to find previous literature and explain how it supports (or doesn’t support) the author’s research. This is a good place to find other related articles too that might be useful!
Reading for Class
If you’re reading a journal article for a seminar course, you’ll want to focus on having a conversation or debate with your class. For that, I recommend you focus on the results and the discussion sections of the paper. If you can understand what the authors discovered and what it means, it will give you a good basis to form your own opinion!
Hope that helps! As we start to wrap up the semester, I wish you all good luck and happy reading!
