How to Read a Scientific Paper

When writing a term paper journal articles are a more, current and concise source than
books. It takes much longer to get information published in a book format. New
information on a topic will first be published in a journal including the most current
references. You can then work your way backward to the earlier and broader resources.
To save time and to read scientific paper most efficiently you need to know how
to approach the paper. Rather than read the entire paper starting at the beginning and
reading straight through to the end use the following steps.
1
st
step: Determine what you expect to get from the paper. What are you looking for?
Specific information
A sense of a broad research field
The details of the application of a technique or method
The latest or an alternate theory on a given topic
Information that allows you to identify the flaws of theory. Critique of a theory
or hypothesis. (Current Anthropology is particularly useful because it publishes
opinions of leading researchers, both pro and con, on the topic)
Different types of information show up in various locations within the paper, and that
shapes and directs your reading. Make sure you know what sort of information you're
looking for.
2
nd
step: Identify the structure:
Know the structure of a scientific paper. Knowing the base structure gives you an
idea where to look, and how to orient yourself as you read the text.
Scientific papers usually follow the format:
Abstract
Introduction,
Materials
Methods or procedure,
Results
Discussion
Conclusion.
There is some variation in the format from journal to journal and between disciplines
and subdiscipline. Papers written for more prestigious journals (Science, Nature,
Physical Review Letters) are shorter and will often mix sections together, or repeat
parts of the structure, several times through the paper.
The Abstract of a scientific paper is a one-paragraph summary of the main points of
the article. You can think of this as the summary so you know what to expect as you
read through the article. The abstract will tell you whether you want to read the paper
or not or if you can find specific information (sample, type of data, conclusions). Most
of the time, the Abstract will tell you what sort of paper you're dealing with. No
citations.
The Introduction is in the beginning of the paper to put the work in a larger context.
This is where you'll find a discussion of the historical antecedents (previous research.)
The easiest way to identify an Introduction section is by the density of citations. If you
scan over a paragraph and see a ton of citations (footnotes, endnotes, parenthetical
author-date-page citations, whatever), it is probably the Introduction section.
The Materials section will give the background and details of the persons or material
being studied. Sometimes the Materials and Methods are combined.
The Methods explanation of what they did and how they did it. The idea of this section
is to provide enough information that someone reading it could reproduce what was
done in detail to check the results. Most real Procedures fall short of this ideal, by
pushing details off into the references (Procedure sections are the second most citation-
heavy sections, usually because they're using a citation to get out of repeating a
lengthy explanation. (i.e. "Following the method of Ref. 19..." or "As explained in...")
The Results are, what they found when they did what they did. This is sometimes
combined with the Methods. The Results sections often includes tables, graphs and
statistics. Dont get bogged down in the details of the statistical analysis your
are primarily interested in the bottom line.
Some journals or types of papers include a Discussion section. Often the most
important information is not what the results show but what the results mean. The
purpose of the Discussion section is to explain what your results mean and what
contribution your paper makes to the field of study. The Discussion section is your
closing argument. It can be useful to first look at the Abstract to get an overview of the
topic and the purported findings. If the topic appears to be of interest then skip to the
Discussion section. If the Discussion is neither stimulating nor convincing about the
meaning and importance of the findings, it does not really matter how the experiments
were performed or what results were reported. A poor Discussion detracts from a
scientific paper. A good Discussion adds a strong finish to a scientific paper. It brings
meaning to your study.
The Conclusion is generally at the end. Conclusion-type sections are where you
discuss sources of error, the determination of uncertainties (which may include some
mini procedure-and-results measurements), and the possible implications. Conclusion
sections are the third area with lots of citations. This is where citations from the
Introduction are repeated. Sometimes entirely new papers that are supported or
contradicted by the current results are brought in here. This is often where you find
proposals of new measurements (usually reference to older papers, whose author
proposed something along the general lines of the new measurement).
3rd step: Know the types of paper. There are nearly as many styles of scientific
writing as there are papers, but you can divide papers into a couple of categories. The
most obvious division is between Theory and Experiment, but within those broad
groups there are some different classes of papers.
One very important class of scientific paper is the Review Article. This is a
paper that reviews a field as a whole. It generally will not contain new results,
but will summarize the important results of many other papers in a given field.
A well-written Review Article is a fantastic way to get a sense of a new field
and who the major researchers are. You can identify Review Articles by length
(they're often 50-60 pages long), number of references (often running into the
hundreds of citations of other articles), and structure (they tend to be more
orderly than other types, and often include a kind of mini-table of contents at
the start. The Abstract and/or Introduction will often explicitly identify the
article as a review, as well. Some journals publish almost exclusively Review
Articles (Reviews o f field, Yearbook of Physical Anthropology) anything with
Advances or Comments in the title is a good bet for a review.
Another important type is the Methods. This category of paper is identified
by phrases like "We report the first..." or "novel technique for..." These are, as
those phrases suggest, new effects being demonstrated for the first time.
They tend not to be great measurements in terms of precision-- 10%
uncertainties are pretty common-- and often won't include much about
uncertainty at all. These papers will often have a lot of detail about the
technique developed.
The other big category of new measurements is the Technical Advance
(Technical report), takes the technique from a Proof-of-Principle
Measurement and refines it a little to make a better measurement of
something. These two can be a little difficult to separate from each other,
because they're generally not measuring exactly the same thing that was
measured to prove the principle, but you can usually figure it out from the
Introduction and Procedure-- a Technical Advance will have less procedural
detail, and more citations of earlier research. Technical Advances also include
more discussion of uncertainties and how to reduce them.

4
th
step: Read the Abstract. Combine that knowledge with your goal, and take the
appropriate action.
The information you need. A paper that measures a specific quantity will generally give
the measured value, with uncertainty, in the Abstract. You still need to look at the
Results and Conclusions to find the caveats and uncertainties, but to get an input for a
quick calculation; you can just take the number from the Abstract.
If you're looking to understand a general field, and the Abstract makes clear that what
you have is a Review Article, then you're all set. start reading the Introduction. If the
Abstract tells you that this is a Technical Advance or a Precision Measurement, you
need to look through the Introduction to find something that is more review-like, or
even a Proof-of-Principle Measurement. Find the appropriate citations in the
references, and go back to the beginning.
If you need to understand a particular technique, say because you started with a
Precision Measurement and followed a citation to the paper you're now looking at, you
want the Abstract to indicate that this is either a Technical Advance or a Proof-of-
Principle, at which point you look for the Procedure section. If the Procedure you've got
doesn't give the information you need, look for references to earlier papers that might
provide more detail.
5th step: A picture is worth a thousand words. Most modern scientific papers will
include figures for most of the important steps. The Results will usually include graphs,
tables, or pictures of the results. These will have descriptive captions with sufficient
information to explain the basic idea. The table or chart with legend should be self
explanatory and be able to stand alone. If the caption doesn't tell you enough, skim the
text near the figure looking for paragraphs that refer to the figure in question and read
the description in the text (i.e. in this sample males are taller than females (Fig. 2).
You can continue to work backwards as needed to get the information you need-- if the
graph is plotting a quantity identified only as some squiggly Greek letter or other
symbol, look for the first equation in which that squiggle appears, and read the
surrounding text for the definition.
(This is harder for older papers (classics), when image reproduction technology wasn't
as good-- some really old papers won't contain any figures at all, in which case you
have no choice but to read the whole thing.)
Don't feel bad about skipping sections that don't matter to you. If all you're really after
is the historical origin of some technique, you don't need anything past the Introduction
and maybe the Procedure. If all you want is the most current value for something
(mean stature of males and females in a specific sample), you don't care about the
Introduction. And so on. Get what you came to the paper for, and get on with what
you're really interested in.