How to Read a Research Paper

Once your research topic is chosen now you have to go for literature review on this topic. For doing literature review you have to read lots of research paper and review paper. Beginners especially undergraduate (UG) and postgraduate (PG) students face lots of problem in their first research article reading. They take lots of time to read an article. Sometime they got confused where to start and where to end. Here I will discuss about how to read a research paper in a proper way. This is for beginners only. It will help them to read the article quickly with fruitful output.

Before going to read any article you must check when (year of publication) the article was published and where (journal name and publisher) it was published. Year of publication will give you idea about whether it is latest or old one. Latest article will give you idea about current status of your research area. Name of journal will give you idea about standard of the article. So, these two things you should check before reading any article. Figure 1 is showing journal title, journal publisher, year of publication, DOI, etc. of a research paper.

Figure 1. A sample showing journal title, name of publisher, year of publication, title of article, DOI of the article, etc.

Majorly a research paper contains title, abstract, introduction, materials and methods, results and discussion, conclusions, and references. Now for reading any research paper you can follow the steps what I have mentioned in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Steps of reading a research paper.

Title

    First read title of the article. From the title you can understand whether it is related to your                 research area or not. If it is related to your research area then go for the next step, otherwise             leave the article and go for other article.

 

 Abstract

    After title you read abstract of the article. Abstract will give you overview of the research paper. Abstract contains major findings of the research and its applications.

 

Last Paragraph of Introduction

After reading abstract you go to the last paragraph of introduction because here authors write their objective of the research paper. This part will give you idea about what research works are presented in the article. Novelty of the research paper can also be understood from this section. I have presented a sample in Figure 3, representing the last paragraph of introduction of an article.

 

Figure 3. A sample showing the last paragraph of introduction in a research paper.

 

Conclusions

After the last paragraph of introduction you go to the conclusions directly. All research outputs are summarized in conclusions of a research paper. Conclusions also contain information about applications of the research outputs and about any unexplored area which can be done in future. A sample of conclusions is presented in Figure 4.

Figure 4. A sample showing conclusions in a research paper.

    After reading these four parts you will understand whether this article is useful for your research or not. If it is useful then go to the Materials and methods section of the article.

 

Materials and Methods

In materials section you will get information about the raw materials used for experiment. Under methods section you will get idea about any specific methods, software or characterization techniques used for the experiments.

 

Results and Discussion

After completion of materials and methods you go to the results and discussion part. Here you will get details idea about the results obtained and their analysis. As a reader you can do your own analysis based on their results and compare with the analysis given in the article. This is for your practice only. Go through each figure and tables as provided in the article and try to understand what they have done.

 

Remaining Part of Introduction

After completion of results and discussion you can go to the remaining part (last paragraph of introduction is already completed) of introduction. First part of introduction generally contains overview of the research area and problem associated to this area. Second part of introduction is generally on literature review. Maximum references are used in this section of the article. You will also get idea about the present scenario of your research area from this section.

 

References

If you want to see the references used by authors in the article you can go to the end reference list. From in text references if you find any reference will help in your research work that you can note and take details of the reference from the end reference list.

 

N.B.

During reading any article you can use highlighter whether the article in hard copy or soft copy. You highlight important text or results in the article, which will help in understanding of the article. The highlighted point will also help you in future if you go for rereading the same article.

 

The snapshots are taken from the following article

 

Boxi S. S., Paria S. Fluorometric sensing of ultralow As(III) concentrations using Ag doped hollow CdS/ZnS bi-layer nanoparticles. Dalton Trans. 2015, 44, 20464-20474.

Related article:

How to Access Research Paper for Free