Graduate Education Research Guide

You read a book differently than a website, and you read a newspaper article differently than both of those. The same is true for a scholarly article. Here's our method for reading a scholarly article:

1. Read the abstract if available. The abstract summarizes the article and will clue you into whether or not it's worth your time to read the rest of the article.
2. Read the conclusion. This is where the author summarizes key points in the article and provides a synthesis of the findings and importance of the research.
3. Read the introduction. This will give you a sense of what the problem was, and why the author did their research.
4. Read the lit review. The literature review places research on a topic in context with other work and analyses contributions that the author of the article believes are relevant. Not only will it give you a sense of what you're working towards, but it can reveal other sources that might be useful to you. To find these sources, check out the bibliography, references or works cited for that paper.
5. Depending on what you'd like to get out of the article, read or skim the methods and results/discussion. The methods section tells you how the author conducted their research and collected their data, while the results or discussion gives the author's analysis and insight on the research that was conducted, including an examination of the meaning and implications of the research for existing and future exploration.

Scholarly articles are written by academics for other academics. They are written for people who already have advanced knowledge of the topic being discussed. Reading through each section multiple times, then reading through the whole paper once or twice afterward will help you get a better sense of what this article is saying and what it means.