Research Guides: Psychology: How to Read Scholarly Articles

Getting Started

Research articles can be dense and intimidating, even to expert researchers. Below are some tips on how to best tackle reading through a research article, and more importantly, understanding it!

With practice, you will find the techniques that work best for you! Until then, remember to breathe, have patience, take notes, and ask for help when you need it.

Anatomy of an Article

Section	What it contains
Abstract	A brief summary of the article. This is a starting point to help you decide if you want to select this article for further review.
Introduction	Describes the research question or problem and sets the context for why the researchers are discussing it. This section draws the reader into the rest of the paper.
Literature Review	A synthesis of existing literature related to the research at hand. This section provides background on the topic for the reader and contextualizes the current paper within the scholarly literature. This is a great place to look for other sources on the topic.
Methods	Describes how the study was designed and how data was collected.
Results	Describes the data that the study collected and will often contain charts and graphs and tables.
Discussion	Analyzes the data and connects the results to the studies discussed in the literature review. This section provides a deeper look at how the authors understand the results of their study, including any limitations, and provides the reader with a greater understanding of what was found.
Conclusion	Concludes the article and will often discuss suggestions for future studies. This is a great place to generate ideas for research topics.
Reference	A standardized list of the sources that the authors cited in developing their research. This will help you locate the other sources you want to find that you identified in the lit review.

Re-thinking Reading

We often want to jump in and read an article straight through, but that more traditional approach can sometimes leave us feeling confused and frustrated, especially if we have not had a lot of practice reading scientific papers. Sometimes we get bogged down with unfamiliar lingo, methods, and statistics and we are unsure if this article really meets our needs. So consider reading it out of order to more quickly get an understanding of the paper and give yourself much needed context to better understand the parts that may be unfamiliar. Be prepared to slow down and note when we come across unfamiliar terms or concepts to look up later (or now if it's really jamming you up!).

1. Abstract >	2. Discussion >	3. Introduction & Literature Review >	4. Results & Methods >
Start with the abstract. Ask what specific results are mentioned and are they relevant to my needs?	Next jump straight to the end to get an in-depth summary of the results. Ask if you agree with the logic of the conclusions and are they useful to you?	Now return to the top and explore the introduction to understand the context in which the study was created. As if you understand the background and if you need to find any of these sources?	Finally, dive into the results and methods to get at the raw data and how it was collected. Ask if you understand the data and if you can identify any issues with their approach?

Once we have gotten a better hold on the resource, we can do some deeper reflection to fully evaluate the study. See the Deep Reading Strategies on the Evaluating Sources page for more questions to ask of the articles you find.