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How to read and understand a scientific paper

How to read and understand a scientific paper: a guide for non-scientists, london school of economics and political science, jennifer raff.

From vaccinations to climate change, getting science wrong has very real consequences. But journal articles, a primary way science is communicated in academia, are a different format to newspaper articles or blogs and require a level of skill and undoubtedly a greater amount of patience. Here Jennifer Raff has prepared a helpful guide for non-scientists on how to read a scientific paper. These steps and tips will be useful to anyone interested in the presentation of scientific findings and raise important points for scientists to consider with their own writing practice.

My post, The truth about vaccinations: Your physician knows more than the University of Google sparked a very lively discussion, with comments from several people trying to persuade me (and the other readers) that their paper disproved everything that I’d been saying. While I encourage you to go read the comments and contribute your own, here I want to focus on the much larger issue that this debate raised: what constitutes scientific authority?

It’s not just a fun academic problem. Getting the science wrong has very real consequences. For example, when a community doesn’t vaccinate children because they’re afraid of “toxins” and think that prayer (or diet, exercise, and “clean living”) is enough to prevent infection, outbreaks happen.

“Be skeptical. But when you get proof, accept proof.” –Michael Specter

What constitutes enough proof? Obviously everyone has a different answer to that question. But to form a truly educated opinion on a scientific subject, you need to become familiar with current research in that field. And to do that, you have to read the “primary research literature” (often just called “the literature”). You might have tried to read scientific papers before and been frustrated by the dense, stilted writing and the unfamiliar jargon. I remember feeling this way! Reading and understanding research papers is a skill which every single doctor and scientist has had to learn during graduate school. You can learn it too, but like any skill it takes patience and practice.

I want to help people become more scientifically literate, so I wrote this guide for how a layperson can approach reading and understanding a scientific research paper. It’s appropriate for someone who has no background whatsoever in science or medicine, and based on the assumption that he or she is doing this for the purpose of getting a basic understanding of a paper and deciding whether or not it’s a reputable study.

The type of scientific paper I’m discussing here is referred to as a primary research article . It’s a peer-reviewed report of new research on a specific question (or questions). Another useful type of publication is a review article . Review articles are also peer-reviewed, and don’t present new information, but summarize multiple primary research articles, to give a sense of the consensus, debates, and unanswered questions within a field. (I’m not going to say much more about them here, but be cautious about which review articles you read. Remember that they are only a snapshot of the research at the time they are published. A review article on, say, genome-wide association studies from 2001 is not going to be very informative in 2013. So much research has been done in the intervening years that the field has changed considerably).

Before you begin: some general advice

Reading a scientific paper is a completely different process than reading an article about science in a blog or newspaper. Not only do you read the sections in a different order than they’re presented, but you also have to take notes, read it multiple times, and probably go look up other papers for some of the details. Reading a single paper may take you a very long time at first. Be patient with yourself. The process will go much faster as you gain experience.

Most primary research papers will be divided into the following sections: Abstract, Introduction, Methods, Results, and Conclusions/Interpretations/Discussion. The order will depend on which journal it’s published in. Some journals have additional files (called Supplementary Online Information) which contain important details of the research, but are published online instead of in the article itself (make sure you don’t skip these files).

Before you begin reading, take note of the authors and their institutional affiliations. Some institutions (e.g. University of Texas) are well-respected; others (e.g. the Discovery Institute ) may appear to be legitimate research institutions but are actually agenda-driven. Tip: g oogle “Discovery Institute” to see why you don’t want to use it as a scientific authority on evolutionary theory.

Also take note of the journal in which it’s published. Reputable (biomedical) journals will be indexed by Pubmed . [EDIT: Several people have reminded me that non-biomedical journals won’t be on Pubmed, and they’re absolutely correct! (thanks for catching that, I apologize for being sloppy here). Check out Web of Science for a more complete index of science journals. And please feel free to share other resources in the comments!] Beware of questionable journals .

As you read, write down every single word that you don’t understand. You’re going to have to look them all up (yes, every one. I know it’s a total pain. But you won’t understand the paper if you don’t understand the vocabulary. Scientific words have extremely precise meanings).

Step-by-step instructions for reading a primary research article

1. Begin by reading the introduction, not the abstract.

The abstract is that dense first paragraph at the very beginning of a paper. In fact, that’s often the only part of a paper that many non-scientists read when they’re trying to build a scientific argument. (This is a terrible practice—don’t do it.). When I’m choosing papers to read, I decide what’s relevant to my interests based on a combination of the title and abstract. But when I’ve got a collection of papers assembled for deep reading, I always read the abstract last. I do this because abstracts contain a succinct summary of the entire paper, and I’m concerned about inadvertently becoming biased by the authors’ interpretation of the results.

2. Identify the BIG QUESTION.

Not “What is this paper about”, but “What problem is this entire field trying to solve?”

This helps you focus on why this research is being done. Look closely for evidence of agenda-motivated research.

3. Summarize the background in five sentences or less.

Here are some questions to guide you:

What work has been done before in this field to answer the BIG QUESTION? What are the limitations of that work? What, according to the authors, needs to be done next?

The five sentences part is a little arbitrary, but it forces you to be concise and really think about the context of this research. You need to be able to explain why this research has been done in order to understand it.

4. Identify the SPECIFIC QUESTION(S)

What exactly are the authors trying to answer with their research? There may be multiple questions, or just one. Write them down. If it’s the kind of research that tests one or more null hypotheses, identify it/them.

Not sure what a null hypothesis is? Go read this one and try to identify the null hypotheses in it. Keep in mind that not every paper will test a null hypothesis.

5. Identify the approach

What are the authors going to do to answer the SPECIFIC QUESTION(S)?

6. Now read the methods section. Draw a diagram for each experiment, showing exactly what the authors did.

I mean literally draw it. Include as much detail as you need to fully understand the work. As an example, here is what I drew to sort out the methods for a paper I read today ( Battaglia et al. 2013: “The first peopling of South America: New evidence from Y-chromosome haplogroup Q” ). This is much less detail than you’d probably need, because it’s a paper in my specialty and I use these methods all the time. But if you were reading this, and didn’t happen to know what “process data with reduced-median method using Network” means, you’d need to look that up.

Image credit: author

You don’t need to understand the methods in enough detail to replicate the experiment—that’s something reviewers have to do—but you’re not ready to move on to the results until you can explain the basics of the methods to someone else.

7. Read the results section. Write one or more paragraphs to summarize the results for each experiment, each figure, and each table. Don’t yet try to decide what the results mean , just write down what they are.

You’ll find that, particularly in good papers, the majority of the results are summarized in the figures and tables. Pay careful attention to them! You may also need to go to the Supplementary Online Information file to find some of the results.

It is at this point where difficulties can arise if statistical tests are employed in the paper and you don’t have enough of a background to understand them. I can’t teach you stats in this post, but here , and here are some basic resources to help you. I STRONGLY advise you to become familiar with them.

Things to pay attention to in the results section:

Any time the words “significant” or “non-significant” are used. These have precise statistical meanings. Read more about this here .
If there are graphs, do they have error bars on them? For certain types of studies, a lack of confidence intervals is a major red flag.
The sample size. Has the study been conducted on 10, or 10,000 people? (For some research purposes, a sample size of 10 is sufficient, but for most studies larger is better).

8. Do the results answer the SPECIFIC QUESTION(S)? What do you think they mean?

Don’t move on until you have thought about this. It’s okay to change your mind in light of the authors’ interpretation—in fact you probably will if you’re still a beginner at this kind of analysis—but it’s a really good habit to start forming your own interpretations before you read those of others.

9. Read the conclusion/discussion/Interpretation section.

What do the authors think the results mean? Do you agree with them? Can you come up with any alternative way of interpreting them? Do the authors identify any weaknesses in their own study? Do you see any that the authors missed? (Don’t assume they’re infallible!) What do they propose to do as a next step? Do you agree with that?

10. Now, go back to the beginning and read the abstract.

Does it match what the authors said in the paper? Does it fit with your interpretation of the paper?

11. FINAL STEP: (Don’t neglect doing this) What do other researchers say about this paper?

Who are the (acknowledged or self-proclaimed) experts in this particular field? Do they have criticisms of the study that you haven’t thought of, or do they generally support it?

Here’s a place where I do recommend you use google! But do it last, so you are better prepared to think critically about what other people say.

(12. This step may be optional for you, depending on why you’re reading a particular paper. But for me, it’s critical! I go through the “Literature cited” section to see what other papers the authors cited. This allows me to better identify the important papers in a particular field, see if the authors cited my own papers (KIDDING!….mostly), and find sources of useful ideas or techniques.)

UPDATE: If you would like to see an example of how to read a science paper using this framework, you can find one here .

I gratefully acknowledge Professors José Bonner and Bill Saxton for teaching me how to critically read and analyze scientific papers using this method. I’m honored to have the chance to pass along what they taught me.

I’ve written a shorter version of this guide for teachers to hand out to their classes. If you’d like a PDF, shoot me an email: jenniferraff (at) utexas (dot) edu. For further comments and additional questions on this guide, please see the Comments Section on the original post .

This piece originally appeared on the author’s personal blog and is reposted with permission.

Featured image credit: Scientists in a laboratory of the University of La Rioja by Urcomunicacion (Wikimedia CC BY3.0)

Note: This article gives the views of the authors, and not the position of the LSE Impact blog, nor of the London School of Economics. Please review our Comments Policy if you have any concerns on posting a comment below.

Jennifer Raff (Indiana University—dual Ph.D. in genetics and bioanthropology) is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology, University of Kansas, director and Principal Investigator of the KU Laboratory of Human Population Genomics, and assistant director of KU’s Laboratory of Biological Anthropology. She is also a research affiliate with the University of Texas anthropological genetics laboratory. She is keenly interested in public outreach and scientific literacy, writing about topics in science and pseudoscience for her blog ( violentmetaphors.com ), the Huffington Post, and for the Social Evolution Forum .

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How to read a scientific paper: a step-by-step guide

Scientific paper format

How to read a scientific paper in 3 steps, step 1: identify your motivations for reading a scientific paper, step 2: use selective reading to gain a high-level understanding of the scientific paper, step 3: read straight through to achieve a deep understanding of a scientific paper, frequently asked questions about reading a scientific paper efficiently, related articles.

A scientific paper is a complex document. Scientific papers are divided into multiple sections and frequently contain jargon and long sentences that make reading difficult. The process of reading a scientific paper to obtain information can often feel overwhelming for an early career researcher.

But the good news is that you can acquire the skill of efficiently reading a scientific paper, and you can learn how to painlessly obtain the information you need.

In this guide, we show you how to read a scientific paper step-by-step. You will learn:

The scientific paper format
How to identify your reasons for reading a scientific paper
How to skim a paper
How to achieve a deep understanding of a paper.

Using these steps for reading a scientific paper will help you:

Obtain information efficiently
Retain knowledge more effectively
Allocate sufficient time to your reading task.

The steps below are the result of research into how scientists read scientific papers and our own experiences as scientists.

Firstly, how is a scientific paper structured?

The main sections are Abstract, Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion. In the table below, we describe the purpose of each component of a scientific paper.

Because the structured format of a scientific paper makes it easy to find the information you need, a common technique for reading a scientific paper is to cherry-pick sections and jump around the paper.

In a YouTube video, Dr. Amina Yonis shows this nonlinear practice for reading a scientific paper. She justifies her technique by stating that “By reading research papers like this, you are enabling yourself to have a disciplined approach, and it prevents yourself from drowning in the details before you even get a bird’s-eye view”.

Selective reading is a skill that can help you read faster and engage with the material presented. In his article on active vs. passive reading of scientific papers, cell biologist Tung-Tien Sun defines active reading as "reading with questions in mind" , searching for the answers, and focusing on the parts of the paper that answer your questions.

Therefore, reading a scientific paper from start to finish isn't always necessary to understand it. How you read the paper depends on what you need to learn. For example, oceanographer Ken Hughes suggests that you may read a scientific paper to gain awareness of a theory or field, or you may read to actively solve a problem in your research.

To successfully read a scientific paper, we advise using three strategies:

Identify your motivations for reading a scientific paper
Use selective reading to gain a high-level understanding of the scientific paper
Read straight through to achieve a deep understanding of a scientific paper .

All 3 steps require you to think critically and have questions in mind.

Before you sit down to read a scientific paper, ask yourself these three questions:

Why do I need to read this paper?
What information am I looking for?
Where in the paper am I most likely to find the information I need?

Is it background reading or a literature review for a research project you are currently working on? Are you getting into a new field of research? Do you wish to compare your results with the ones presented in the paper? Are you following an author’s work, and need to keep up-to-date on their current research? Are you keeping tabs on emerging methods in your field?

All of these intentions require a different reading approach.

For example, if you're delving into a new field of research, you'll want to read the introduction to gather background information and seminal references. The discussion section will also be important to understand the broader context of the findings.

If you aim to extend the work presented in a paper, and this study will be the starting point for your work, it's crucial to read the paper deeply.

If your focus is on the study design and techniques used by the authors, you'll spend most of your time reading and understanding the methods section.

Sometimes you'll need to read a paper to discuss it in your own research. This may be to compare or contrast your work with the paper's content, or to stimulate a discussion on future applications of your work.

If you are following an author’s work, a quick skim might suffice to understand how the paper fits into their overall research program.

Tip: Knowing why you want to read the paper facilitates how you will read the paper. Depending on your needs, your approach may take the form of a surface-level reading or a deep and thorough reading.

Knowing your motivations will guide your navigation through the paper because you have already identified which sections are most likely to contain the information you need. Approaching reading a paper in this way saves you time and makes the task less daunting.

➡️ Learn more about how to write a literature review

Begin by gaining an overview of the paper by following these simple steps:

Read the title. What type of paper is it? Is it a journal article, a review, a methods paper, or a commentary?
Read the abstract . The abstract is a summary of the study. What is the study about? What question was addressed? What methods were used? What did the authors find, and what are the key findings? What do the authors think are the implications of the work? Reading the abstract immediately tells you whether you should invest the time to read the paper fully.
Look at the headings and subheadings, which describe the sections and subsections of the paper. The headings and subheadings outline the story of the paper.
Skim the introduction. An introduction has a clear structure. The first paragraph is background information on the topic. If you are new to the field, you will read this closely, whereas an expert in that field will skim this section. The second component defines the gap in knowledge that the paper aims to address. What is unknown, and what research is needed? What problem needs to be solved? Here, you should find the questions that will be addressed by the study, and the goal of the research. The final paragraph summarizes how the authors address their research question, for example, what hypothesis will be tested, and what predictions the authors make. As you read, make a note of key references. By the end of the introduction, you should understand the goal of the research.
Go to the results section, and study the figures and tables. These are the data—the meat of the study. Try to comprehend the data before reading the captions. After studying the data, read the captions. Do not expect to understand everything immediately. Remember, this is the result of many years of work. Make a note of what you do not understand. In your second reading, you will read more deeply.
Skim the discussion. There are three components. The first part of the discussion summarizes what the authors have found, and what they think the implications of the work are. The second part discusses some (usually not all!) limitations of the study, and the final part is a concluding statement.
Glance at the methods. Get a brief overview of the techniques used in the study. Depending on your reading goals, you may spend a lot of time on this section in subsequent readings, or a cursory reading may be sufficient.
Summarize what the paper is about—its key take-home message—in a sentence or two. Ask yourself if you have got the information you need.
List any terminology you may need to look up before reading the paper again.
Scan the reference list. Make a note of papers you may need to read for background information before delving further into the paper.

Congratulations, you have completed the first reading! You now have gained a high-level perspective of the study, which will be enough for many research purposes.

Now that you have an overview of the work and you have identified what information you want to obtain, you are ready to understand the paper on a deeper level. Deep understanding is achieved in the second and subsequent readings with note-taking and active reflection. Here is a step-by-step guide.

Active engagement with the material
Critical thinking
Creative thinking
Synthesis of information
Consolidation of information into memory.

Highlighting sentences helps you quickly scan the paper and be reminded of the key points, which is helpful when you return to the paper later.

Notes may include ideas, connections to other work, questions, comments, and references to follow up on.

There are many ways for taking notes on a paper. You can:

Print out the paper, and write your notes in the margins.
Annotate the paper PDF from your desktop computer, or mobile device .
Use personal knowledge management software, like Notion , Obsidian, or Evernote, for note-taking. Notes are easy to find in a structured database and can be linked to each other.
Use reference management tools to take notes. Having your notes stored with the scientific papers you’ve read has the benefit of keeping all your ideas in one place. Some reference managers, like Paperpile, allow you to add notes to your papers, and highlight key sentences on PDFs .

Note-taking facilitates critical thinking and helps you evaluate the evidence that the authors present. Ask yourself questions like:

What new contribution has the study made to the literature?
How have the authors interpreted the results? (Remember, the authors have thought about their results more deeply than anybody else.)
What do I think the results mean?
Are the findings well-supported?
What factors might have affected the results, and have the authors addressed them?
Are there alternative explanations for the results?
What are the strengths and weaknesses of the study?
What are the broader implications of the study?
What should be done next?

Note-taking also encourages creative thinking . Ask yourself questions like:

What new ideas have arisen from reading the paper?
How does it connect with your work?
What connections to other papers can you make?
Write a summary of the paper in your own words. This is your attempt to integrate the new knowledge you have gained with what you already know from other sources and to consolidate that information into memory. You may find that you have to go back and re-read some sections to confirm some of the details.
Discuss the paper with others. You may find that even at this stage, there are still aspects of the paper that you are striving to understand. It is now a good time to reach out to others—peers in your program, your advisor, or even on social media. In their 10 simple rules for reading a scientific paper , Maureen Carey and coauthors suggest that participating in journal clubs, where you meet with peers to discuss interesting or important scientific papers, is a great way to clarify your understanding.
A scientific paper can be read over many days. According to research presented in the book " Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning " by writer Peter Brown and psychology professors Henry Roediger and Mark McDaniel, "spaced practice" is more effective for retaining information than focusing on a single skill or subject until it is mastered. This involves breaking up learning into separate periods of training or studying. Applying this research to reading a scientific paper suggests that spacing out your reading by breaking the work into separate reading sessions can help you better commit the information in a paper to memory.

A dense journal article may need many readings to be understood fully. It is useful to remember that many scientific papers result from years of hard work, and the expectation of achieving a thorough understanding in one sitting must be modified accordingly. But, the process of reading a scientific paper will get easier and faster with experience.

The best way to read a scientific paper depends on your needs. Before reading the paper, identify your motivations for reading a scientific paper, and pinpoint the information you need. This will help you decide between skimming the paper and reading the paper more thoroughly.

Don’t read the paper from beginning to end. Instead, be aware of the scientific paper format. Take note of the information you need before starting to read the paper. Then skim the paper, jumping to the appropriate sections in the paper, to get the information you require.

It varies. Skimming a scientific paper may take anywhere between 15 minutes to one hour. Reading a scientific paper to obtain a deep understanding may take anywhere between 1 and 6 hours. It is not uncommon to have to read a dense paper in chunks over numerous days.

First, read the introduction to understand the main thesis and findings of the paper. Pay attention to the last paragraph of the introduction, where you can find a high-level summary of the methods and results. Next, skim the paper by jumping to the results and discussion. Then carefully read the paper from start to finish, taking notes as you read. You will need more than one reading to fully understand a dense research paper.

To read a scientific paper critically, be an active reader. Take notes, highlight important sentences, and write down questions as you read. Study the data. Take care to evaluate the evidence presented in the paper.

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How to Read Research Papers— Unveiling AI Tool for Reading

Reading research papers is an essential skill for students, academics, and professionals in various fields. It allows you to stay updated with the latest findings, develop critical thinking skills, and contribute to scholarly discussions. However, understanding these papers can be challenging due to their complex language and structure. That’s why we have written this article, which will provide you with comprehensive strategies on how to read a research paper effectively.

Let’s get started with how to identify the structure of a research paper!

Identify the structure of a research paper

Understanding the structure of a research paper is the first step toward how to read research paper effectively. Most research papers follow a standard structure, which includes an abstract , introduction , methodology , results, discussion and conclusion . Familiarizing yourself with the research paper structure can help you navigate the paper and understand its content.

Each section of a research paper serves a specific purpose. The abstract provides a summary of the entire research paper, the introduction presents the research question, the methodology explains how the research was conducted, the results section presents the findings, the discussion interprets these findings, and the conclusion summarizes the paper and suggests areas for future research.

Source: University of Wisconsin

Abstract: The abstract serves as a concise summary of the entire research paper. To efficiently grasp its content, focus on key elements such as the research question, methodology, and significant findings. This will provide a quick overview and help you decide whether the paper aligns with your interests.

Introduction: The research paper introduction sets the stage for the research, presenting the problem statement and the purpose of the study. Take note of the research gap, hypotheses, and objectives discussed here to understand the context of the paper.

Methodology: Understanding the methods employed in a study is crucial for evaluating the research's validity. Take note of the research design, data collection, and analysis methods to comprehend how the study was conducted.

Results: The results section presents the outcomes of the research. Approach this section with a critical mindset, assessing whether the results align with the research question and the methods used. Consider the implications of the findings within the broader context of the field.

Conclusion: The conclusion summarizes the key findings and their significance. It's a crucial part of the paper that brings together the entire study. Take the time to reflect on how the research contributes to the existing body of knowledge.

Citations: Follow the trail of references provided in the paper. This not only enhances your understanding but also leads you to related works that can deepen your knowledge of the subject.

Active Reading:

Active reading is a strategy that involves interacting with the text. This can include highlighting important information, making notes in the margins, and asking questions. Active reading can help you understand the content of the paper and remember it more effectively.

When reading a research paper, try to identify the main points, arguments, and evidence. Ask yourself questions like:

What is the research question?
What methods were used to answer it?
What were the results? What conclusions were drawn?

This will help you engage with the paper and understand its content.

Source: https://idaho.pressbooks.pub/write/chapter/reading-for-writing/

Note-Taking:

Note-taking is another effective reading strategy. It involves writing down important information, ideas, and questions. Note-taking can help you remember the content of the paper, organize your thoughts, and prepare for discussions or writing assignments.

When taking notes, try to be concise and use your own words. This will help you understand the information and remember it more effectively. You can also use symbols or diagrams to represent complex ideas.

Source: University of Toronto

Using AI Tools to Summarize Research Paper:

When research papers are flooded with complex language, jargon, and acronyms, it’s important to use AI summarizer that helps you breakdown the sentences and makes it easier to read the information. In that case, you can make use of SciSpace Copilot which not only explains the highlighted section or paragraph, but also explains you the equations, tables, figures, and images present in the research paper. You can also rely on other AI tools to comprehend research papers in a short span of time.

Watch this video to learn how to use the AI summarizer:

Dealing with Technical Jargon:

Research papers often contain a lot of technical jargon. Don't be intimidated; instead, create a glossary for yourself. Look up unfamiliar terms and gradually build your understanding of the terminology used in your field of interest. As mentioned above, you can use AI summarizer to decode the jargon and get the essence of the research paper.

Joining Academic Communities:

Engage in discussions and forums related to your area of interest. Academic communities provide valuable insights, differing perspectives, and opportunities for networking with experts in the field.

Staying Updated on Research Trends:

To read research papers effectively, it's crucial to stay informed about the latest developments in your field. Subscribe to academic journals, follow reputable researchers on social media, and attend conferences or webinars to stay updated.

Using Academic Search Engines:

Make use of online tools and databases such as Google Scholar, PubMed, SciSpace , and academic journals to access a vast repository of research papers. These platforms often provide additional features like citation tracking and related articles, enriching your reading experience.

Also Read: Beast Academic Search Engines(2024)

Reading research papers is a complex task that requires a good understanding of the structure of a research paper, effective reading strategies, and the ability to interpret results. However, with practice and patience, you can develop these skills and become proficient at reading research papers.

Remember, the goal is not just to read the paper, but to understand it, evaluate it, and use it to contribute to your own research or professional development.

Frequently Asked Questions

Active reading helps understand research papers better. It involves activities like highlighting, taking notes, asking questions, and summarizing. This makes it easier to understand and evaluate the research material.

Taking notes during research helps you remember important information, stay organized, avoid plagiarism, think critically, and serve as a reference for future use, allowing you to revisit key points and findings as needed.

SciSpace notebook is the go-to tool for taking notes effortlessly

The best AI tool for reading research papers varies based on individual needs. A popular AI tools include SciSpace Copilot.

Using AI tools to read research papers is easy. First, choose a tool, example — SciSpace Copilot. Then, upload your paper. It analyzes it and explains it in a language of your choice. You can then use this summary to help with your research or understanding of the topic.

The Impact of Visual Abstracts on Boosting Citations

Introducing SciSpace’s Citation Booster To Increase Research Visibility

AI for Meta-Analysis — A Comprehensive Guide

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CAREER COLUMN
07 July 2022

How to find, read and organize papers

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Maya Gosztyla is a PhD student in biomedical sciences at the University of California, San Diego.

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“I’ll read that later,” I told myself as I added yet another paper to my 100+ open browser tabs.

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May 9th, 2016

How to read and understand a scientific paper: a guide for non-scientists.

95 comments | 1997 shares

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

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“Be skeptical. But when you get proof, accept proof.” –Michael Specter

Before you begin: some general advice

Step-by-step instructions for reading a primary research article

1. Begin by reading the introduction, not the abstract.

2. Identify the BIG QUESTION.

Not “What is this paper about”, but “What problem is this entire field trying to solve?”

This helps you focus on why this research is being done. Look closely for evidence of agenda-motivated research.

3. Summarize the background in five sentences or less.

Here are some questions to guide you:

What work has been done before in this field to answer the BIG QUESTION? What are the limitations of that work? What, according to the authors, needs to be done next?

4. Identify the SPECIFIC QUESTION(S)

Not sure what a null hypothesis is? Go read this , then go back to my last post and read one of the papers that I linked to (like this one ) and try to identify the null hypotheses in it. Keep in mind that not every paper will test a null hypothesis.

5. Identify the approach

What are the authors going to do to answer the SPECIFIC QUESTION(S)?

6. Now read the methods section. Draw a diagram for each experiment, showing exactly what the authors did.

Image credit: author

It is at this point where difficulties can arise if statistical tests are employed in the paper and you don’t have enough of a background to understand them. I can’t teach you stats in this post, but here , here , and here are some basic resources to help you. I STRONGLY advise you to become familiar with them.

Things to pay attention to in the results section:

Any time the words “significant” or “non-significant” are used. These have precise statistical meanings. Read more about this here .
If there are graphs, do they have error bars on them? For certain types of studies, a lack of confidence intervals is a major red flag.
The sample size. Has the study been conducted on 10, or 10,000 people? (For some research purposes, a sample size of 10 is sufficient, but for most studies larger is better).

8. Do the results answer the SPECIFIC QUESTION(S)? What do you think they mean?

9. Read the conclusion/discussion/Interpretation section.

10. Now, go back to the beginning and read the abstract.

Does it match what the authors said in the paper? Does it fit with your interpretation of the paper?

11. FINAL STEP: (Don’t neglect doing this) What do other researchers say about this paper?

Who are the (acknowledged or self-proclaimed) experts in this particular field? Do they have criticisms of the study that you haven’t thought of, or do they generally support it?

Here’s a place where I do recommend you use google! But do it last, so you are better prepared to think critically about what other people say.

UPDATE: If you would like to see an example of how to read a science paper using this framework, you can find one here .

This piece originally appeared on the author’s personal blog and is reposted with permission.

Featured image credit: Scientists in a laboratory of the University of La Rioja by Urcomunicacion (Wikimedia CC BY3.0)

About the Author

About the author

95 Comments

Very good Indeed.I always Read Abstract First Time always ……Thanks

Great information and guide to reading and understanding scientific paper. However, there are non-scientific student asked to do scientific research and it would be great to actually give an example and you point out the answers to the steps in the sample article or journal cited. Thank you.

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I can summarize it eve further: three stars by a number in a table = good, no stars = bad

within the context of the fact that a very sizable portion of scientific papers are falsified, what does this article mean?

Your “fact” needs explanation and evidence, otherwise it can be considered alternative.

That’s why you don’t skip step 11

I think it would be useful also to point out that, even after diligently pursuing all of these excellent steps, the reader is usually still unable to determine whether the subjects or materials even existed. Unlike with lay media, where most important stories are covered by multiple sources, and where facts are sometimes checkable from primary sources – even by readers – it is rare indeed that a reader can go beyond the words on the page.

Is the fact that you read instructions on how to read a paper not evidence that there is something wrong with the way we write papers?

The issue of scientific literacy is always challenging for my students. But this is the most practical and helpful guide I’ve ever seen on the web, thanks for this. I usually share with my students the following tips already mentioned above: – Learn the vocabulary before reading – Summarize the background in five sentences or less – Identify the BIG QUESTION

But the pieces of advice this guide gives are structured better and easier. I especially love this one: Don’t yet try to decide what the results mean, just write down what they are. Thanks again for writing this piece!

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you left out ask for the data, so you can check for yourself… (ie trust but verify)

an example a psychology paper that surveyed a group of people about conspiracy theories (n=137) and it’s main/only novel finding was that people that believed in conspiracies theories, there was a tendency for people to believe in mutually contradictory conspiracy theories. ie individual could believe that Princess Diana faked her own death, whilst at the same time had been murdered by MI5

The paper, was duly called – Dead and Alive – M Wood et al…

However. after requesting the data. there was not a single individual person that ticked the survey boxes, that simultaneously believed this finding. Not one person.

The problem, most people surveyed did not believe either of those conspiracies, and inappropriate stats method was applied to data, that assumed a non skewed dataset. Thus, not believing in A and not believing in B correlated, but it also gave a ‘result that believing in A, and Believing in B also correlated..

A very dumb paper… Author still hasn’t retracted it yet.

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I love this! Great simmered-down resource for my undergrads- both science and non-science majors. Thanks for sharing!

“Web of Science” link is broken (at least for me) but a useable alternative is webofknowledge.com (same resource, different name).

I think it is important to note that the journal in which a paper is published is no proof as to the rigor of that paper. A listing in PubMed does not guarantee quality; thus, you need to focus on teaching people how to interpret the paper without relying on a simple JTASS approach to initial assessment. This may be a guide, but nothing more. I say this as a former editor of a MEDLINE journal. There can be good papers in bad journals and bad papers in good ones. But you are correct. Key questions are: What is the question? How will we answer the question? What answer did we get? Did we use the right tools to answer the question? What do we think it means? What else could we do? And thus we can train people to watch for sleights of hand, such as shifting primary outcomes, data mining, salami slicing, etc.

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Yikes! This is a lot of work just to read a single paper! It’s almost the same as writing a paper! I understand the logic in why you recommend this, but the average person is going to be willing to spend 20-30 minutes reading and trying to learn. This method calls for multiple hours of effort and I just don’t seem many non-scientist people being willing to do that when they’re more curious than actually invested. I was really hoping this entry was going to make it easier to navigate the foreign and confusing world that these papers represent, and it probably will if someone does this process repeatedly for quite some time…..like a scientist…..but most of us aren’t scientists and don’t have that kind of time to dedicate to something that’s not our work or family.

By tradition, we expect our scientists to report their findings by codifying them in unreadable gobbledygook. Then we write instructions on how to decode that unreadable nonsense!!

We need to encourage papers to be written in everyday language so it is easier for all. Problem solved.

I wholeheartedly agree with Kaveh Bazargan. From personal experience as a non-scientist trying to do this with medical research papers is a very intimidating and isolating experience. Most people don’t have the time spare to even try to learn this skill. It would be great if systematic reviewers who are acknowledged experts in reading and analysing papers could find a way of communicating the important information about individual papers to non-scientists before – or instead of – burying them in systematic reviews and meta-analyses which are even more difficult to understand. Structured plain language summaries of primary research would be very helpful rather than individuals having to teach themselves how to read and understand a scientific paper which is written for other scientists in “unreadable goggledygook”. Many (most?) papers conceal methodogical flaws in the research conduct which are almost impossible to spot without years of scientific training.

I love this! Extraordinary cooled off assets for my students both science and non-science majors. A debt of gratitude is in order for sharing!

Regarding step 11, if you have access to Web of Science I recommend looking up how many citations the paper has (this will also vary depending on the age of the paper) and who cites it, and whether there even any replies to it in the peer-reviewed literature.

Do you literally do this for every paper you read? I’m curious how much time it takes you to go from start to finish on what you would consider a typical paper. How often do you read new articles a week?

This post has the laudable goal of helping nonscientists understand the primary literature, but the recommendations seem even more onerous than they have to be. For example, the idea that one should write down every single word that he/she doesn’t know? That sounds more like a task for a scientist scrutinizing the work of a rival. For a nonscientist, there may be dozens and dozens of unknown words, and chasing down the meaning of each one may cause a serious forest/trees problem. I agree that there’s no substitute for the hard work of digging into a paper, but following the prescribed advice to the letter would be utterly exhausting for almost any lay reader. I base these comments on my experiences as a biology researcher and undergraduate instructor.

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I really like your post and the effort, but much of the problem wouldn’t exist if we, academics, did a better job in writing down the correct conclusions. Researcher degrees of freedom are seldom properly understood and we keep on having the tendency to be overdeterministic about statistics that are not intended as such. Of course we want to communicate in black and white about our tests (significance!) because it is a human tendency to persuade the reader. Most of the research probably is not as inconsistent as it first seems but we forget to report the proper statistics to see so (CI around the ES)

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Thank you very much for sharing a guide that will help me to follow the best standards for writing a scientific paper even I am not a scientist.

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Reading the abstract last is one, not the, way to read a paper. It it biases the naive reader, then they are not reviewing with a level of skepticism required to evaluate science. We put abstracts first because they lay out the problem, overview the sample and design, and tersely describe what they think they discovered. Then, as I read, I have a roadmap in my head of what to look for to determine for myself whether or not they found something noteworthy.

What is the problem? Are hypotheses to be tested likely to illuminate/clarify the problem? Is the sample appropriate for testing and was it sampled without imputing bias? Were measures appropriate and do they have a history of validity? We the analytics applied appropriate for testing at the level of power needed give the sample size? [Here even many scientist are ill-equipped to judge.] After enumerating results, do the authors list weaknesses in their design that might suggest replication is necessary? If not, check for snow – as in snowjob. If significance levelsare low or variables correlate with one another too much, are moderators discussed? [e.g., results hold for males but not females, old vs young, fat vs skinny, etc.). If so, why were data not re-analyzed to control for moderator effects on results?

Lastly, if the word “prove” appears anywhere in the paper, assume it is junk science (like fake news). Research is never ever done to prove anything. Research is only done to find out. Once a preponderance of studies report a similar finding looking at the same problem with different people, measures, designs, and statistical analyses, then you have something like proof; consensus.

Lastly, if you are a conspiracy theory believer, you will disbelieve any scientific study that does not support your word view. Keep this in mind. A few studies that run counter to the prevailing consensus is not PROOF that your conspiracy is correct, and mainstream science is wrong. I do not know a single scientist (and I know thousands globally) who do not consider climate change to be well-evidenced. Similarly, evolutionary theory remains useful – our current understanding of genomic medicine hinges on cellular mutation, which is evolution on a microscopic scale.

This is a very useful set of instructions, but I found the following statement highly amusing: “Before you begin reading, take note of the authors and their institutional affiliations. Some institutions (e.g. University of Texas) are well-respected; others (e.g. the Discovery Institute) may appear to be legitimate research institutions but are actually agenda-driven.”

All research institutions are agenda driven (including my alma mater, the University of Texas), because funding and professional advancement depend on results. Researchers are fallible humans and subject to temptation and error. There is a very big lawsuit pending against Duke University (see below) for falsifying data.

When I read any research (especially medical), I now search for evidence of legal or professional action. So you might add that as #12: “Lawsuits? Retractions?” Caveat lector.

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/353/6303/977.full

http://www.dukechronicle.com/article/2016/09/experts-address-research-fabrication-lawsuit-against-duke-note-litigation-could-be-protracted

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Weird advice, like: ‘I always read the abstract last’ . This is advice for referees, not for general readers. I always read the abstract first.

An abstract can be misleading, but I am often not qualified enough to judge that. Actually, this blog post title and abstract are misleading too: your advice is for referees, not for non-scientists. So you wanted to provide an immersive experience into a misleading piece, well done 😉

First thing, get rid of the word proof. This is a huge error in that even if you have reputable scientists, journals, institutions, etc. that what is published, especially in a single article, is anything resembling a fact. It is merely research findings from one instance and in no way forms a fact. This is the next level of misinterpretation of science, even among those able to comprehend the journal article, that science produces or discovers facts. There is nothing that is factual that we know of.

Several comments:

For the mid-term exam in a graduate class I took in experimental design the professor would select half a dozen articles from the peer reviewed literature, tell her students to pick three and explain what they had done wrong. New articles for every class and she never ran out.

Beware of articles published in inappropriate journals, no matter how respectable (E.g., something about sociology or criminology published in a medical journal). This is a strategy for sneaking agenda driven research past the peer review process by going to a journal whose reviewers are likely to be unfamiliar with the subject while the editors are sympathetic to the agenda.

There is a reason research papers are written in what looks like “scientific gobbledygook” to lay persons. They are not intended for a lay audience and the goal is to be extremely precise with the technical details of what was done and found so other scientists can examine the results and, most important, attempt to replicate them.. There is no way to simplify the language and put it in lay terms without losing the precision required for a scientific study. E.g., a particle physicist may give a lay explanation of an experiment in metaphorical terms of little balls of energy smashing into each other, but their peers are going to want to see the pages and pages of mathematics that really describe what was happening.

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I would add “Check the source of funding for the research.” If paper on the safety of glyphosate is funded by Bayer or Monsanto, or a paper on climactic change is funded by Exxon, read no further.

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Get the dissertation writing service students look for these days with the prime focus being creating a well researched and lively content on any topic.

The non-scientist should pay extra attention towards this article for the non-technical writing and understanding for them.

A lot of a researcher’s work includes perusing research papers, regardless of whether it’s to remain progressive in their field, propel their logical comprehension, survey compositions, or assemble data for a task proposition or concede application. Since logical articles are not the same as different writings, similar to books or daily paper stories, they ought to be perused in an unexpected way.

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Thanks, I’ll use this a lot for my MSc Thesis.

Those are some great tips but please don’t forget that each school has its own requirements to academic papers.

Clarifying your methodology for reading science paper: excellent idea and great information. Thanks a lot!

Thanks for sharing this blog. Its very helpful for me and I bookmarked this for future

Excelente trabajo, original. Lo recomendaré para mis estudiantes de Posgrado. Si no hay problema, me gustaría hacer una traducción al castellano para el uso de mis estudiantes de pregrado de Sociología.

Excellent work,original. I will recommend it for my graduate students. If there is no problem, I would like to make a translation into Spanish for the use of my undergraduate Sociology students.

Hi Luis, all our works are CC licensed so you are more than welcome to make a translation provided you link back to the original source. See here for details: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en_GB

Great information , it is very helpful thanks for sharing the blog .

Step 1 and 10 is a great idea, but I still think it’s possible to read the abstract with the introduction and still keep an open mind? and shouldn’t they keep their results for the interpretation section? sorry new to reading scientific papers

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Thank you for sharing the tips, they were very helpful.

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The article is extremely helpful. Considering that scientific research are not as easy, the tips in the article are great.

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Thank you for posting this. It has really helped a lot, especially for those of us who always read the abstract first haha

Thanks for writing this blog. It is very much informative and at the same time useful for me

Yeah, great advice on how to be objective from someone who openly declares their prejudice in the opening statement.

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Do you in a real sense do this for each paper you read? I’m interested what amount of time it requires for you to go beginning to end on what you would think about an average paper. How frequently do you read new articles seven days?

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That is literally my question too, I see it as quite time consuming to conduct such a lengthy process for all scientific articles we come across especially as one has other responsibilities to give attention too

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Thanks for posting this. You are doing a service to the general public and also graduate students by not only posting this but answering all sincere questions. I have a Ph. D. in Zoology and have been a peer-reviewer for at least 12 papers and am first author of three peer-reviewed papers. I have taught statistics in two universities as a contract professor and all of my papers rely on use of statistics. To answer a frequently asked question, yes, personally it can take me a couple of hours or several more to read some papers. This is true for my colleagues as well. Scientific papers are written so as to be as concise as possible and this can make them hard to read. They often also use technical terms which one has to look up. At least biology and statistics. nothing I have read (or written) has been in “goobledygook” or purposely incomprehensible jargon but they do use terms and concepts that are probably unfamiliar to the layman. I think what the author means, by her comment on absstracts can be intepreted as “don’t JUST read the abstract. Be sure to read the introduction. Personally I go to the discussion and conclusion next.

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Your writing skills and passion for sharing your knowledge and experiences are truly outstanding. . Keep writing and inspiring others with your words.

I would add, look at who funded the study and their financial interests. Most science is not independent it is funded by those with an agenda. Look at the demographic data, length of time the study took place, what was left out, where you might need more information. Look at who was included and excluded in the data set. Anyone that has taken statistics knows what you include or exclude in the data set can skew and or outright change the outcome.

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How to read a scientific manuscript.

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Definition/Introduction

The Statistics and Healthcare Economics section of StatPearls seeks to provide a framework for learners to engage with evidence-based medicine (EBM) in order to maintain high standards of clinical practice.

The father of EBM, Dr. David Sackett, describes EBM as “conscientious, explicit and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients … integrating individual clinical expertise with the best available external clinical evidence from systematic research." [1] “Good doctors use both individual clinical expertise and the best available external evidence, and neither alone is enough .” [1] (Italics provided)

Issues of Concern

Evidence-based medicine involves “life-long, self-directed learning in which caring for our own patients creates the need for clinically important information about diagnosis, prognosis, therapy, and other clinical and health care issues, and in which we [1] :

Convert this information needs into answerable questions
Track down, with maximum efficiency, the best evidence with which to answer them (whether from the clinical examination, the diagnostic laboratory from research evidence, or other sources)
Critically appraise that evidence for its validity (closeness to the truth) and usefulness (clinical applicability)
Integrate this appraisal with our clinical expertise and apply it in practice
Evaluate our performance."

The above establishes the paradigm that clinicians must maintain curiosity and continuous learning to ensure effective care for all patients regardless of competence and experience. Please refer to the StatPearls overview chapter on evidence-based medicine for more background.

Clinical Significance

This article will cover the approach to reading, digesting, and applying content from scientific manuscripts to optimize patient care for all providers.

Original research manuscripts have the following sections (in chronologic order) [2] :

Title and Abstract
Introduction (Background and Objectives)
Methods (Design, Setting, Participants, Variables, Statistics)
Results (Participants, Descriptives, Outcomes, Subgroups)
Tables and Figures
Discussion (Key findings, Limitations, Interpretations)
Conflict of Interest (COI), Author affiliations, Acknowledgments, Funding

Though less likely to follow a standardized outline, review articles typically consist of the following sections [3] :

Context/Objective
Methods (Data Sources, Study Selection, Data Extraction)
Results (Tables and Figures)

Literature Search

The first step in answering a question about clinical management (and the first step in embarking upon one’s own research) is searching for the existing literature on a topic. The fundamental skill in evaluating the results of a literature search is understanding and interpreting a scientific paper. Other StatPearls chapters cover different types of studies (retrospective, prospective, cohort, case-control, blinded, epidemiologic, etc.). This chapter focuses on the practical aspects of reading a paper.

One main distinction involves whether a study describes a quality improvement project (measuring adherence to the current standard of care) or presenting new data (potential changes to the standard of care). One, two, or a handful of papers cannot establish a new standard of care; thus, one must always exercise caution in rushing to adopt practices gleaned from limited evidence that may prove false in subsequent research. [4]

The literature search is a crucial feature of practicing EBM. Tactics are described elsewhere, but one should explore different tools such as OVID, Pubmed, and Google Scholar. [5] Unlike a general Google web search, Pubmed Clinical Queries and Google Scholar perform very well, though different users will have different preferences. [6] You can filter the search by year, subject type (human or animal), article type (trials, review), etc. Pay close attention to the journal in which papers appear. For instance, when using Google Web search, you may find non-peer-reviewed papers and non-indexed manuscripts, which likely will have less reliability. If you find and spend time reading ten low-quality papers from obscure predatory journals, you will not draw accurate conclusions about your clinical question. Again, garbage in, garbage out. Sadly, scientific literature becomes less and less readable over time, with authors lacking the skill or motivation to write concisely and straightforwardly. [7]

Efficient Manuscript Reading

Effective literature search methods
Introduction if needed
Tables and Figures
Results and Discussion
Abstract again
Methods and COI
Write down notes, consider implications for practice, discuss with a colleague.

The first and most lasting impression readers have of a scientific publication is the Title. Because much of the audience only read the Title, it should convey the main take-home point. [8] The other component of the paper that most readers will attend to is the Abstract. One should read the title and Abstract first to establish a blueprint for what the author(s) wants to convey related to their research.

The next step in reading a manuscript will depend upon one’s prior knowledge of the topic, goals of reading the paper, level of concentration/time to devote to reading, and overall interest. If one has a limited background knowledge on the topic, one should begin with the Introduction. The Introduction should establish what is already published/known on the topic, what gaps exist in the literature, and what this study intends to accomplish / hypotheses the researchers intend to test. Typically, the last paragraph of the introduction clearly states the aims of the study; thus, one can skip to this paragraph if desired.

The most efficient next step in reading the manuscript is reviewing the Tables and Figures. Tables should present data on the study subjects, their characteristics, and possibly how the subject sample or population was divided for the study. If done well, Figures will visually capture the larger themes of the paper, the most important findings presented in a visuospatial form (compared to word form in the conclusions).

After reviewing the Tables and Figures, move next to the Results section. Here, the author summarizes the objective results, ideally with no opinion as to the significance. You should begin to interpret the results and how they relate to the Tables and Figures. You can use your own background knowledge to compare the results to what has already been established in the literature. Even with limited background in statistics, attempt to critique the analysis, ensuring it makes sense. Consult and scrutinize the methods section with any questions on techniques, regardless of your background in statistics. Refer to other publications on tips to detect misleading or inaccurate statistical claims. [9]

Next, read the Discussion section. The first paragraph of the Discussion will usually highlight the most important findings of the study. The Discussion should interpret the results in light of stated hypotheses, citing within reason all prior (both remote and recent) studies directly relevant to these results. Look for gaps in citations – did the authors leave out any seminal papers? Do they make connections that seem reasonable, logical? Follow the given References; use this paper to explore prior similar papers. You will often find Reference(s) that is more precisely addressing the clinical question you seek to answer for your practice.

The Discussion (and Conclusion) sections can be fraught with bias, as the authors move from statement of objective data to interpretation. As the reader, our role is to beware of and detect biases or unsubstantiated conclusions that do not directly follow from the data presented. Do not simply accept conclusions without this critical evaluation.

At this point, you may refer back to the Abstract to consider if the authors captured the most salient background, results, and conclusions. Did they take too much liberty with the conclusions? Did they downplay something of significance? To address questions about methodology, refer to the Methods section. Does the precise patient population allow for the generalization of the conclusions? Do the settings and participants look similar to your practice environment? Could you apply these findings to your patients?

Finally, you should review the authors’ affiliations, contributions (if provided), and especially the conflicts of interest (COI). Authors with extensive COI may have difficulty objectively assessing their own data and making reasonable conclusions.

Once you have read the entire paper and feel comfortable with understanding, write down notes, think about how this research could impact your practice, and go explain the study to someone! This will test your comprehension and lead to better retention of the material, as with any new content in preparation for a licensing examination. [10] Follow the other references you found in the paper and take notes from them. Put together a well-rounded answer to your original question. Exercise caution in adopting new practices to reduce iatrogenic harm from overzealous attempts at progressive practice. [11] Maintain a balance between knowledge of new findings and the need for the reversal of disproven practices. [12]

Nursing, Allied Health, and Interprofessional Team Interventions

The plural of anecdote is data, but don’t forget, garbage in, garbage out. Aggregating patient data can yield important insight superior to the recollection of individual patient encounters. However, poor methodology, bias, or a combination of both can lead to erroneous conclusions that eventually hurt patients. Continue to practice this skill of reading the literature, and review more papers related to this topic. [13]

If you have answered your clinical question and weighed the risk of harm and benefits, you can begin to integrate this new knowledge into clinical practice. If there is a gap in the literature related to your question, consider conducting your own research. Your ability to critically read a manuscript will equip you with the skills to write your own (covered in a separate StatPearls chapter).

Review Questions
Access free multiple choice questions on this topic.
Comment on this article.

Disclosure: Martin Huecker declares no relevant financial relationships with ineligible companies.

Disclosure: Jacob Shreffler declares no relevant financial relationships with ineligible companies.

This book is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ ), which permits others to distribute the work, provided that the article is not altered or used commercially. You are not required to obtain permission to distribute this article, provided that you credit the author and journal.

Cite this Page Huecker MR, Shreffler J. How To Read A Scientific Manuscript. [Updated 2022 Sep 12]. In: StatPearls [Internet]. Treasure Island (FL): StatPearls Publishing; 2024 Jan-.

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How To Read A Paper

Papers that go beyond numbers (qualitative research) Trisha Greenhalgh, Rod Taylor
Papers that summarise other papers (systematic reviews and meta-analyses) Trisha Greenhalgh
Papers that tell you what things cost (economic analyses) Trisha Greenhalgh
Papers that report diagnostic or screening tests Trisha Greenhalgh
Papers that report drug trials Trisha Greenhalgh
Statistics for the non-statistician. II: “Significant” relations and their pitfalls Trisha Greenhalgh
Statistics for the non-statistician Trisha Greenhalgh
Assessing the methodological quality of published papers Trisha Greenhalgh
Getting your bearings (deciding what the paper is about) Trisha Greenhalgh
The Medline database Trisha Greenhalgh

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How To Read A Paper

Papers that go beyond numbers (qualitative research) Trisha Greenhalgh, Rod Taylor
Papers that summarise other papers (systematic reviews and meta-analyses) Trisha Greenhalgh
Papers that tell you what things cost (economic analyses) Trisha Greenhalgh
Papers that report diagnostic or screening tests Trisha Greenhalgh
Papers that report drug trials Trisha Greenhalgh
Statistics for the non-statistician. II: “Significant” relations and their pitfalls Trisha Greenhalgh
Statistics for the non-statistician Trisha Greenhalgh
Assessing the methodological quality of published papers Trisha Greenhalgh
Getting your bearings (deciding what the paper is about) Trisha Greenhalgh
The Medline database Trisha Greenhalgh

Follow us on

Content links.

Collections
Health in South Asia
Women’s, children’s & adolescents’ health
News and views
BMJ Opinion
Rapid responses
Editorial staff
BMJ in the USA
BMJ in South Asia
Submit your paper
BMA members
Subscribers
Advertisers and sponsors

Explore BMJ

Our company
BMJ Careers
BMJ Learning
BMJ Masterclasses
BMJ Journals
BMJ Student
Academic edition of The BMJ
BMJ Best Practice
The BMJ Awards
Email alerts
Activate subscription

Information

How to Read a Research Paper – A Guide to Setting Research Goals, Finding Papers to Read, and More

If you work in a scientific field, you should try to build a deep and unbiased understanding of that field. This not only educates you in the best possible way but also helps you envision the opportunities in your space.

A research paper is often the culmination of a wide range of deep and authentic practices surrounding a topic. When writing a research paper, the author thinks critically about the problem, performs rigorous research, evaluates their processes and sources, organizes their thoughts, and then writes. These genuinely-executed practices make for a good research paper.

If you’re struggling to build a habit of reading papers (like I am) on a regular basis, I’ve tried to break down the whole process. I've talked to researchers in the field, read a bunch of papers and blogs from distinguished researchers, and jotted down some techniques that you can follow.

Let’s start off by understanding what a research paper is and what it is NOT!

What is a Research Paper?

A research paper is a dense and detailed manuscript that compiles a thorough understanding of a problem or topic. It offers a proposed solution and further research along with the conditions under which it was deduced and carried out, the efficacy of the solution and the research performed, and potential loopholes in the study.

A research paper is written not only to provide an exceptional learning opportunity but also to pave the way for further advancements in the field. These papers help other scholars germinate the thought seed that can either lead to a new world of ideas or an innovative method of solving a longstanding problem.

What Research Papers are NOT

There is a common notion that a research paper is a well-informed summary of a problem or topic written by means of other sources.

But you shouldn't mistake it for a book or an opinionated account of an individual’s interpretation of a particular topic.

Why Should You Read Research Papers?

What I find fascinating about reading a good research paper is that you can draw on a profound study of a topic and engage with the community on a new perspective to understand what can be achieved in and around that topic.

I work at the intersection of instructional design and data science. Learning is part of my day-to-day responsibilities. If the source of my education is flawed or inefficient, I’d fail at my job in the long term. This applies to many other jobs in Science with a special focus on research.

There are three important reasons to read a research paper:

Knowledge — Understanding the problem from the eyes of someone who has probably spent years solving it and has taken care of all the edge cases that you might not think of at the beginning.
Exploration — Whether you have a pinpointed agenda or not, there is a very high chance that you will stumble upon an edge case or a shortcoming that is worth following up. With persistent efforts over a considerable amount of time, you can learn to use that knowledge to make a living.
Research and review — One of the main reasons for writing a research paper is to further the development in the field. Researchers read papers to review them for conferences or to do a literature survey of a new field. For example, Yann LeCun’ s paper on integrating domain constraints into backpropagation set the foundation of modern computer vision back in 1989. After decades of research and development work, we have come so far that we're now perfecting problems like object detection and optimizing autonomous vehicles.

Not only that, with the help of the internet, you can extrapolate all of these reasons or benefits onto multiple business models. It can be an innovative state-of-the-art product, an efficient service model, a content creator, or a dream job where you are solving problems that matter to you.

Goals for Reading a Research Paper — What Should You Read About?

The first thing to do is to figure out your motivation for reading the paper. There are two main scenarios that might lead you to read a paper:

Scenario 1 — You have a well-defined agenda/goal and you are deeply invested in a particular field. For example, you’re an NLP practitioner and you want to learn how GPT-4 has given us a breakthrough in NLP. This is always a nice scenario to be in as it offers clarity.
Scenario 2 — You want to keep abreast of the developments in a host of areas, say how a new deep learning architecture has helped us solve a 50-year old biological problem of understanding protein structures. This is often the case for beginners or for people who consume their daily dose of news from research papers (yes, they exist!).

If you’re an inquisitive beginner with no starting point in mind, start with scenario 2. Shortlist a few topics you want to read about until you find an area that you find intriguing. This will eventually lead you to scenario 1.

ML Reproducibility Challenge

In addition to these generic goals, if you need an end goal for your habit-building exercise of reading research papers, you should check out the ML reproducibility challenge.

You’ll find top-class papers from world-class conferences that are worth diving deep into and reproducing the results.

They conduct this challenge twice a year and they have one coming up in Spring 2021. You should study the past three versions of the challenge, and I’ll write a detailed post on what to expect, how to prepare, and so on.

Now you must be wondering – how can you find the right paper to read?

How to Find the Right Paper to Read

In order to get some ideas around this, I reached out to my friend, Anurag Ghosh who is a researcher at Microsoft. Anurag has been working at the crossover of computer vision, machine learning, and systems engineering.

Here are a few of his tips for getting started:

Always pick an area you're interested in.
Read a few good books or detailed blog posts on that topic and start diving deep by reading the papers referenced in those resources.
Look for seminal papers around that topic. These are papers that report a major breakthrough in the field and offer a new method perspective with a huge potential for subsequent research in that field. Check out papers from the morning paper or C VF - test of time award/Helmholtz prize (if you're interested in computer vision).
Check out books like Computer Vision: Algorithms and Applications by Richard Szeliski and look for the papers referenced there.
Have and build a sense of community. Find people who share similar interests, and join groups/subreddits/discord channels where such activities are promoted.

In addition to these invaluable tips, there are a number of web applications that I’ve shortlisted that help me narrow my search for the right papers to read:

r/MachineLearning — there are many researchers, practitioners, and engineers who share their work along with the papers they've found useful in achieving those results.

Arxiv Sanity Preserver — built by Andrej Karpathy to accelerate research. It is a repository of 142,846 papers from computer science, machine learning, systems, AI, Stats, CV, and so on. It also offers a bunch of filters, powerful search functionality, and a discussion forum to make for a super useful research platform.

Google Research — the research teams at Google are working on problems that have an impact on our everyday lives. They share their publications for individuals and teams to learn from, contribute to, and expedite research. They also have a Google AI blog that you can check out.

How to Read a Research Paper

After you have stocked your to-read list, then comes the process of reading these papers. Remember that NOT every paper is useful to read and we need a mechanism that can help us quickly screen papers that are worth reading.

To tackle this challenge, you can use this Three-Pass Approach by S. Keshav . This approach proposes that you read the paper in three passes instead of starting from the beginning and diving in deep until the end.

The three pass approach

The first pass — is a quick scan to capture a high-level view of the paper. Read the title, abstract, and introduction carefully followed by the headings of the sections and subsections and lastly the conclusion. It should take you no more than 5–10 mins to figure out if you want to move to the second pass.
The second pass — is a more focused read without checking for the technical proofs. You take down all the crucial notes, underline the key points in the margins. Carefully study the figures, diagrams, and illustrations. Review the graphs, mark relevant unread references for further reading. This helps you understand the background of the paper.
The third pass — reaching this pass denotes that you’ve found a paper that you want to deeply understand or review. The key to the third pass is to reproduce the results of the paper. Check it for all the assumptions and jot down all the variations in your re-implementation and the original results. Make a note of all the ideas for future analysis. It should take 5–6 hours for beginners and 1–2 hours for experienced readers.

Tools and Software to Keep Track of Your Pipeline of Papers

If you’re sincere about reading research papers, your list of papers will soon grow into an overwhelming stack that is hard to keep track of. Fortunately, we have software that can help us set up a mechanism to manage our research.

Here are a bunch of them that you can use:

Mendeley [not free] — you can add papers directly to your library from your browser, import documents, generate references and citations, collaborate with fellow researchers, and access your library from anywhere. This is mostly used by experienced researchers.

Zotero [free & open source] — Along the same lines as Mendeley but free of cost. You can make use of all the features but with limited storage space.

Notion — this is great if you are just starting out and want to use something lightweight with the option to organize your papers, jot down notes, and manage everything in one workspace. It might not stand anywhere in comparison with the above tools but I personally feel comfortable using Notion and I have created this board to keep track of my progress for now that you can duplicate:

⚠️ Symptoms of Reading a Research Paper

Reading a research paper can turn out to be frustrating, challenging, and time-consuming especially when you’re a beginner. You might face the following common symptoms:

You might start feeling dumb for not understanding a thing a paper says.
Finding yourself pushing too hard to understand the math behind those proofs.
Beating your head against the wall to wrap it around the number of acronyms used in the paper. Just kidding, you’ll have to look up those acronyms every now and then.
Being stuck on one paragraph for more than an hour.

Here’s a complete list of emotions that you might undergo as explained by Adam Ruben in this article .

Key Takeaways

We should be all set to dive right in. Here’s a quick summary of what we have covered here:

A research paper is an in-depth study that offers an detailed explanation of a topic or problem along with the research process, proofs, explained results, and ideas for future work.
Read research papers to develop a deep understanding of a topic/problem. Then you can either review papers as part of being a researcher, explore the domain and the kind of problems to build a solution or startup around it, or you can simply read them to keep abreast of the developments in your domain of interest.
If you’re a beginner, start with exploration to soon find your path to goal-oriented research.
In order to find good papers to read, you can use websites like arxiv-sanity, google research, and subreddits like r/MachineLearning.
Reading approach — Use the 3-pass method to find a paper.
Keep track of your research, notes, developments by using tools like Zotero/Notion.
This can get overwhelming in no time. Make sure you start off easy and increment your load progressively.

Remember: Art is not a single method or step done over a weekend but a process of accomplishing remarkable results over time.

You can also watch the video on this topic on my YouTube channel :

Feel free to respond to this blog or comment on the video if you have some tips, questions, or thoughts!

If this tutorial was helpful, you should check out my data science and machine learning courses on Wiplane Academy . They are comprehensive yet compact and helps you build a solid foundation of work to showcase.

Web and Data Science Consultant | Instructional Design

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Research Techniques for Undergraduate Research

Library Research
Citation Tracing/Tracking in Google Scholar
Strategies for Research
Chicago Manual of Style
Writing Research Papers
How to Read a Citation
How to read and understand a scientific paper
Skimming an article
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Post-Workshop Quiz
Post-Workshop Reflection

How to Read a Scientific Paper overview

Below, you'll find two different articles about how to read a scientific paper. The second one is written by a science journalist and was added to this guide in 2024. We hope you find both articles useful. They overlap and bring useful techniques to light.

How to read and understand a scientific paper: a guide for non-scientists

Handout for How to Read and Understand a Scientific Paper: A Guide for Non-Scientists

Reprinted by permission of the author, Jennifer Raff, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Kansas, https://about.me/jenniferraff :: original URL: https://violentmetaphors.com/2013/08/25/how-to-read-and-understand-a-scientific-paper-2/ Last week’s post ( The truth about vaccinations: Your physician knows more than the University of Google ) sparked a very lively discussion, with comments from several people trying to persuade me (and the other readers) that their paper disproved everything that I’d been saying. While I encourage you to go read the comments and contribute your own, here I want to focus on the much larger issue that this debate raised: what constitutes scientific authority?

“Be skeptical. But when you get proof, accept proof.” –Michael Specter

Before you begin: some general advice Reading a scientific paper is a completely different process than reading an article about science in a blog or newspaper. Not only do you read the sections in a different order than they’re presented, but you also have to take notes, read it multiple times, and probably go look up other papers for some of the details. Reading a single paper may take you a very long time at first. Be patient with yourself. The process will go much faster as you gain experience.

Also take note of the journal in which it’s published. Reputable (biomedical) journals will be indexed by Pubmed . [ EDIT: Several people have reminded me that non-biomedical journals won’t be on Pubmed, and they’re absolutely correct! (thanks for catching that, I apologize for being sloppy here). Check out Web of Science for a more complete index of science journals. And please feel free to share other resources in the comments!] Beware of questionable journals .

Step-by-step instructions for reading a primary research article

1. Begin by reading the introduction, not the abstract.

The abstract is that dense first paragraph at the very beginning of a paper. In fact, that’s often the only part of a paper that many non-scientists read when they’re trying to build a scientific argument. (This is a terrible practice—don’t do it.). When I’m choosing papers to read, I decide what’s relevant to my interests based on a combination of the title and abstract. But when I’ve got a collection of papers assembled for deep reading, I always read the abstract last . I do this because abstracts contain a succinct summary of the entire paper, and I’m concerned about inadvertently becoming biased by the authors’ interpretation of the results.

2. Identify the BIG QUESTION.

Not “What is this paper about”, but “What problem is this entire field trying to solve?”

This helps you focus on why this research is being done. Look closely for evidence of agenda-motivated research.

3. Summarize the background in five sentences or less.

Here are some questions to guide you:

What work has been done before in this field to answer the BIG QUESTION? What are the limitations of that work? What, according to the authors, needs to be done next?

4. Identify the SPECIFIC QUESTION(S)

5. Identify the approach

What are the authors going to do to answer the SPECIFIC QUESTION(S)?

6. Now read the methods section. Draw a diagram for each experiment, showing exactly what the authors did.

It is at this point where difficulties can arise if statistical tests are employed in the paper and you don’t have enough of a background to understand them. I can’t teach you stats in this post, but here , here , and here are some basic resources to help you. I STRONGLY advise you to become familiar with them.

THINGS TO PAY ATTENTION TO IN THE RESULTS SECTION:

-Any time the words “ significant ” or “ non-significant ” are used. These have precise statistical meanings. Read more about this here .

-If there are graphs, do they have error bars on them? For certain types of studies, a lack of confidence intervals is a major red flag.

-The sample size. Has the study been conducted on 10, or 10,000 people? (For some research purposes, a sample size of 10 is sufficient, but for most studies larger is better).

8. Do the results answer the SPECIFIC QUESTION(S)? What do you think they mean?

9. Read the conclusion/discussion/Interpretation section.

10. Now, go back to the beginning and read the abstract.

Does it match what the authors said in the paper? Does it fit with your interpretation of the paper?

11. FINAL STEP: (Don’t neglect doing this) What do other researchers say about this paper?

Who are the (acknowledged or self-proclaimed) experts in this particular field? Do they have criticisms of the study that you haven’t thought of, or do they generally support it?

Here’s a place where I do recommend you use google! But do it last, so you are better prepared to think critically about what other people say.

Now brace for more conflict– next week we’re going to use this method to go through a paper on a controversial subject! Which one would you like to do? Shall we critique one of the papers I posted last week?

UPDATE: If you would like to see an example, you can find one here ———————————————————————————————————

How to Read a Scientific Paper by a science journalist

How to read a scientific paper.

Alexandra Witze
November 6, 2018

Léelo en español

Screenshot of a paragraph of a paper with an annotation in red.

It’s one of the first, and likely most intimidating, assignments for a fledgling science reporter. “Here,” your editor says. “Write up this paper that’s coming out in Science this week.” And suddenly you’re staring at an impenetrable PDF—pages of scientific jargon that you’re supposed to understand, interview the author and outside commenters about, and describe in ordinary English to ordinary readers.

Fear not! The Open Notebook is here with a primer on how to read a scientific paper. These tips and tricks will work whether you’re covering developmental biology or deep-space exploration. The key is to familiarize yourself with the framework in which scientists describe their discoveries, and to not let yourself get bogged down in detail as you’re trying to understand the overarching point of it all. As a specific example, we’ve marked up a Science paper in the accompanying image.

But first, let’s break down what a typical scientific paper contains. Most include these basic sections, usually in this order:

The author list is as it sounds, a roster of the scientists involved in the discovery. But hidden within the names are clues that will help you navigate the politics of reporting the story. The first name in the list is often (but not always) the person who did the most work, perhaps the graduate student or postdoc who is the lead on the project. This person is usually (but not always) designated as the “corresponding author” by an asterisk by their name, or by their email address being given on the first or last page of the paper. If the corresponding author is not the first name in the author list, then take extra care to Google the various authors and figure out how they relate to one another. (In many fields, such as biology and psychology, the last author in the list is typically the senior author or lab head. In others, such as experimental physics where the author list can number in the dozens or hundreds, authors are usually listed alphabetically.) The senior author might be able to provide some broad perspective as to why and how the study was undertaken. But the first or corresponding author is much more likely to be the person who actually did the work, and therefore your better request for an interview.

The abstract is a summary of the paper’s conclusions. Always read this first, several times over. Usually the significance of the paper will be laid out here, albeit in technical terms. A good abstract will summarize what research was undertaken, what the scientists found, and why it’s important. (Compare the abstract of this recent Nature paper , on the discovery of a prehistoric human hybrid, to the first three paragraphs of Sarah Kaplan’s Washington Post story reporting the discovery . Kaplan clearly captures the essence of the new findings as described in the abstract.) Relevant numbers such as the statistical significance of the finding are often highlighted here as well. Abstracts are prone to typographical errors, so be sure to double-check numbers against the body of the paper as well as your interview with the author.

The body of the paper lays out the bulk of the scientific findings. Pay special attention to the first couple of paragraphs, which often serve as an introduction, describing previous research in the field and why the new work is important. This is an excellent place to hunt for references to other papers that can serve as your guidepost for outside commenters (more on that later). Next will come the details of how the research was done; sometimes much of this is broken out into a later methods section (see below). Then come the results , which may be lengthy. Look for phrases such as “we concluded” to clue you in to their most important points. If statistics are involved, see Rachel Zamzow’s primer on how to spot shady statistics.

The final section (sometimes labeled as discussion ) often summarizes the new findings, puts them in context, and describes the likely next steps to be taken. If your reading has been dragging through the results section, now is the time to refocus. “That sort of information will help a writer answer the nearly inevitable “so what?” question for their readers as well as their editors,” says Sid Perkins, a freelance science writer in Crossville, Tennessee, who writes for outlets including Science and Science News for Students .

The figures are the data, graphics, or other visual representations of the discovery. Read these and their captions carefully, as they often contain the bulk of the new findings. If you don’t understand the figures, ask the scientist to walk you through them during your interview. Don’t be afraid to say things like, “I don’t understand what the x-axis means.”

The references are your portal into a world of additional inscrutable PDFs. You need to plow through at least a couple of the citations, because they are your initial guide in figuring out who you need to call for outside comment. The references are referenced (usually by number) within the body of the text, so you can pinpoint the ones that will be most helpful. For instance, if the text talks about how previous studies have found the opposite of this new one, go look up the cited references, because those authors would be excellent outside commenters. If you do not have access to the journals described in the references, you can at least look at the paper abstract, which is always outside the paywall , to get a sense of what those earlier studies concluded. (For further caveats on references, see below.)

The acknowledgments are meant for transparency, to show the contributions of the various authors and where they got their funding from. Things to look for in here are whether they thank other scientists for “discussions” or “review” of the work; sometimes peer reviewers are explicitly acknowledged as such, in which case you can call those people right away for outside comment. Occasionally there are humorous tidbits that you can pick up on for a story , such as when authors thank the field-camp guards who kept them safe from predatory polar bears . The funding section is usually pro forma, but it is worth scanning for mention of unusual sources of income, such as from a science-loving philanthropist. If the authors declare competing financial interests (such as a patent filing) you will need to report those out and make sure you understand what financial conflicts of interest may be clouding their objectivity.

The methods often appear in a ridiculously small typeface after the body of the paper. These lay out how the actual experiments were done. Scour these for any details that will bring your story to life. For instance, they might describe how the climate models were so complicated that they took more than a year to run on one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.

Supplementary information comes with some but not all papers. In most cases it is extra material that the journal did not want to devote space to describing in the paper itself. Always check it out, because there may be hidden gems. In a 2015 study of global lake warming , the only way to find out which specific lakes were warming—and talk about the nearest ones for readers —was to wade through the supplementary information. In another recent example, Harvard researchers left it to the supplementary information to explain that they cranked up a leaf-blower to see how lizards fared during hurricanes, a fact that the Associated Press’s Seth Borenstein turned into his lede .

So now you’re armed with the basics of what makes up a science paper. How should you tackle reading for your next assignment? The task will be more manageable if you break it into a series of jobs.

Strategize During the First Pass

Your first dive into a paper should be aimed at gathering the most important information for your story—that is, what the research found and why anyone should care. For that, consider following the approach of Mark Peplow, a freelance science journalist in Cambridge, England, who writes for publications including Nature and Chemical & Engineering News .

If it’s a field he’s relatively familiar with, such as chemistry or materials science, Peplow takes a first pass through the paper, underlining with a red pen all the facts that are likely to make it into his initial draft. “That means I can produce a skeleton first draft of the story by simply writing a series of sentences containing what I’ve underlined, and then go into editing mode to jigsaw them into the right order,” he says. (In my annotated example, I’ve done this for the abstract using a purple pen.)

As Peplow reads, he looks for numbers to help make the story sing (“… so porous that a chunk of material the size of a sugar cube contains the surface area of 17 tennis courts”—see orange highlighter in the annotated paper) and methodological details that might prompt a fun interview question (“How scary was it to be pouring that very hazardous liquid into another one?”). He also keeps an eye out for anything indicating an emerging trend or other examples of the same phenomenon, which can be useful for context within the story or as a forward-looking kicker (see how he pulls this off in this Chemical & Engineering News story) .

But what if the paper is in a field you’re not experienced with, and you don’t understand the terminology? Peplow has a plan for that too. “I read the abstract, bathe in my lack of understanding, and mentally throw the abstract away,” he says.

Then he goes through the paper, underlining fragments he understands and putting wiggly lines next to paragraphs that he thinks sound important, but doesn’t actually know what they mean. Jargon words get circled, and equations ignored. He forges onward, paying attention to phrases such as “our findings,” “revealed,” “established,” or “our measurements show”—signs that these are the new and important bits. “Once I’ve reached the end of the paper, and I’m sure I don’t understand it, I remind myself it’s not my fault,” Peplow says.

At that point, Peplow starts looking up definitions for the jargon words, either with Google or Wikipedia or in a stack of science reference books he picked up for free when a local library closed. He jots definitions of the words on the paper. To understand concepts, he sometimes searches EurekAlert! for past press releases that explain core concepts, or Googles a string of keywords and adds “review” to hunt for a more comprehensible description.

By this point, Peplow can circle back to the paragraphs marked with wiggly lines and start to understand them better. What he doesn’t yet comprehend, he marks down as an interview question for the researcher.

Circle Back for What You May Have Missed

Before picking up the phone for that interview, it’s worth making a second pass through the paper to see what else you need to help you in your reporting. Check, usually near the end of the paper, to see whether the scientists discuss what the next steps should be—either for their own team or for other groups following up to confirm or expand on the new results, says Perkins. That can provide a ready-made kicker for your story.

Susan Milius, a reporter who covers the life sciences for Science News , often makes a beeline straight for the references to try to start identifying outside commenters for a piece. She will find those PDFs and then look within the references’ references to build a broad understanding of the field. One caveat, though: Be sure to research how these possible commenters are connected to the author of the current study. Once, Milius phoned an outside commenter who had published on the topic in question some years earlier—but that scientist turned out to be the spouse of the new paper’s author. She had a different last name than her husband.

It’s also worth remembering that the authors may well be biased in which references they include in the paper. Self-citations, in which authors try to boost their citation count by adding their previous publications to the reference list, are common. And sometimes authors deliberately omit papers by competing groups, a fact that is not always caught during the peer-review process. So don’t rely on the references within the PDF to be comprehensive; try a Google Scholar search using keywords from the paper to unearth whether there are competing groups out there.

Other clues may lie in how long the manuscript took to make it through the peer-review process. For many journals these dates come at the very end of the paper, marked something like “submitted” and “accepted.” Different journals have different timescales for publishing, but it is always worth looking to see whether the manuscript languished an extraordinary amount of time (like many months) in the review process. If so, ask the author why things took so long. (A fairly innocuous way to do this is to say something like, “I noticed it took a while for this paper to be accepted. Can you tell me how that process went?” Then be prepared for the authors to go on a rant about peer review.)

Hunt for Extra Details

Finally, see if there are additional sources of information you can sweep into your reporting. Check to see if the author’s institution is issuing a press release about the work; if this isn’t already posted on EurekAlert!, ask the author during the interview if they are preparing additional press materials and, if so, how you can get hold of those. This is also a good time to ask for any art, such as photos or videos to illustrate your story. You will of course have already looked at all their figures in detail, so you’ll be well placed to request the art that is most relevant to what you and your editor are looking for.

With these tools at your side, you should be well suited to tackle your next scientific paper.

Alexandra Witze is a science journalist in Boulder, Colorado, and a member of The Open Notebook ’s board of directors. Her news story on the Martian subglacial lake (marked up above) appeared in Nature . Follow her on

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Reading a Scientific Paper

Reading a scientific paper can seem like a daunting task. However, learning how to properly read a scholarly article can make the process much easier! Understanding the different parts of a scientific article can help the reader to understand the material.

The title of the article can give the reader a lot of information about its contents, such as the topic, major ideas, and participants.
Abstracts help to summarize the article and give the reader a preview of the material they are about to read. The abstract is very important and should be read with care.

Introduction

What is the article's purpose being stated in the introduction?
Why would this article be of interest to experts in the field?
What is already known, or not known, about this topic?
What specifically is the hypothesis? If one is not given, what are the expectations of the author?
Having these questions in mind when reading the introduction can help the reader gain an understanding of the article as a whole. A good research article will answer these questions in the introduction and be consistent with their explanation throughout the rest of the article.
What are the specific methods used by the researcher?
Does the researcher provide a coherent and viable plan for their experiment?
Has the author missed any variables that could effect the results of their findings?
How do the methods in this article compare with similar articles?
Ex: they are correlated and support the hypothesis, they contradict they hypothesis, ect.
If there are differences from the hypothesis, what differences did the researcher find?
Are the findings described in an unbiased way?
Is there new information presented that wasn't known before?
Is the researcher unbiased in their presentation?
Ex: More research needs to be done, the findings show a solution to a known problem, etc.
What suggestions are made about future research? If no suggestions are made, should there be?
The conclusion points out the important findings from the experiment or research. Occasionally, it will incorporated into the discussion section of the paper.

General Tips

Fully comprehending a scientific article will most likely take more than one read. Don't be discouraged if you don't understand everything the first time, reading scientific papers is a skill that is developed with practice.
Start with the broad and then to the specific. Begin by understanding the topic of the article before trying to dig through all the fine points the author is making.
Always read the tables, charts, and figures. These will give a visual clue to the methods and results sections of the paper and help you to understand the data. The author put these in the paper for a reason, don't dismiss their importance.
Don't be afraid to ask questions or look up definitions. If you do not understand a term or concept, do not be afraid to ask for help or look up an explanation.
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Reading a Scholarly Article or Research Paper

Identifying a research problem to investigate usually requires a preliminary search for and critical review of the literature in order to gain an understanding about how scholars have examined a topic. Scholars rarely structure research studies in a way that can be followed like a story; they are complex and detail-intensive and often written in a descriptive and conclusive narrative form. However, in the social and behavioral sciences, journal articles and stand-alone research reports are generally organized in a consistent format that makes it easier to compare and contrast studies and to interpret their contents.

General Reading Strategies

W hen you first read an article or research paper, focus on asking specific questions about each section. This strategy can help with overall comprehension and with understanding how the content relates [or does not relate] to the problem you want to investigate. As you review more and more studies, the process of understanding and critically evaluating the research will become easier because the content of what you review will begin to coalescence around common themes and patterns of analysis. Below are recommendations on how to read each section of a research paper effectively. Note that the sections to read are out of order from how you will find them organized in a journal article or research paper.

1. Abstract

The abstract summarizes the background, methods, results, discussion, and conclusions of a scholarly article or research paper. Use the abstract to filter out sources that may have appeared useful when you began searching for information but, in reality, are not relevant. Questions to consider when reading the abstract are:

Is this study related to my question or area of research?
What is this study about and why is it being done ?
What is the working hypothesis or underlying thesis?
What is the primary finding of the study?
Are there words or terminology that I can use to either narrow or broaden the parameters of my search for more information?

2. Introduction

If, after reading the abstract, you believe the paper may be useful, focus on examining the research problem and identifying the questions the author is trying to address. This information is usually located within the first few paragraphs of the introduction or in the concluding paragraph. Look for information about how and in what way this relates to what you are investigating. In addition to the research problem, the introduction should provide the main argument and theoretical framework of the study and, in the last paragraphs of the introduction, describe what the author(s) intend to accomplish. Questions to consider when reading the introduction include:

What is this study trying to prove or disprove?
What is the author(s) trying to test or demonstrate?
What do we already know about this topic and what gaps does this study try to fill or contribute a new understanding to the research problem?
Why should I care about what is being investigated?
Will this study tell me anything new related to the research problem I am investigating?

3. Literature Review

The literature review describes and critically evaluates what is already known about a topic. Read the literature review to obtain a big picture perspective about how the topic has been studied and to begin the process of seeing where your potential study fits within the domain of prior research. Questions to consider when reading the literature review include:

W hat other research has been conducted about this topic and what are the main themes that have emerged?
What does prior research reveal about what is already known about the topic and what remains to be discovered?
What have been the most important past findings about the research problem?
How has prior research led the author(s) to conduct this particular study?
Is there any prior research that is unique or groundbreaking?
Are there any studies I could use as a model for designing and organizing my own study?

4. Discussion/Conclusion

The discussion and conclusion are usually the last two sections of text in a scholarly article or research report. They reveal how the author(s) interpreted the findings of their research and presented recommendations or courses of action based on those findings. Often in the conclusion, the author(s) highlight recommendations for further research that can be used to develop your own study. Questions to consider when reading the discussion and conclusion sections include:

What is the overall meaning of the study and why is this important? [i.e., how have the author(s) addressed the " So What? " question].
What do you find to be the most important ways that the findings have been interpreted?
What are the weaknesses in their argument?
Do you believe conclusions about the significance of the study and its findings are valid?
What limitations of the study do the author(s) describe and how might this help formulate my own research?
Does the conclusion contain any recommendations for future research?

5. Methods/Methodology

The methods section describes the materials, techniques, and procedures for gathering information used to examine the research problem. If what you have read so far closely supports your understanding of the topic, then move on to examining how the author(s) gathered information during the research process. Questions to consider when reading the methods section include:

Did the study use qualitative [based on interviews, observations, content analysis], quantitative [based on statistical analysis], or a mixed-methods approach to examining the research problem?
What was the type of information or data used?
Could this method of analysis be repeated and can I adopt the same approach?
Is enough information available to repeat the study or should new data be found to expand or improve understanding of the research problem?

6. Results

After reading the above sections, you should have a clear understanding of the general findings of the study. Therefore, read the results section to identify how key findings were discussed in relation to the research problem. If any non-textual elements [e.g., graphs, charts, tables, etc.] are confusing, focus on the explanations about them in the text. Questions to consider when reading the results section include:

W hat did the author(s) find and how did they find it?
Does the author(s) highlight any findings as most significant?
Are the results presented in a factual and unbiased way?
Does the analysis of results in the discussion section agree with how the results are presented?
Is all the data present and did the author(s) adequately address gaps?
What conclusions do you formulate from this data and does it match with the author's conclusions?

7. References

The references list the sources used by the author(s) to document what prior research and information was used when conducting the study. After reviewing the article or research paper, use the references to identify additional sources of information on the topic and to examine critically how these sources supported the overall research agenda. Questions to consider when reading the references include:

Do the sources cited by the author(s) reflect a diversity of disciplinary viewpoints, i.e., are the sources all from a particular field of study or do the sources reflect multiple areas of study?
Are there any unique or interesting sources that could be incorporated into my study?
What other authors are respected in this field, i.e., who has multiple works cited or is cited most often by others?
What other research should I review to clarify any remaining issues or that I need more information about?

NOTE : A final strategy in reviewing research is to copy and paste the title of the source [journal article, book, research report] into Google Scholar . If it appears, look for a "cited by" followed by a hyperlinked number [e.g., Cited by 45]. This number indicates how many times the study has been subsequently cited in other, more recently published works. This strategy, known as citation tracking, can be an effective means of expanding your review of pertinent literature based on a study you have found useful and how scholars have cited it. The same strategies described above can be applied to reading articles you find in the list of cited by references.

Reading Tip

Specific Reading Strategies

Effectively reading scholarly research is an acquired skill that involves attention to detail and an ability to comprehend complex ideas, data, and theoretical concepts in a way that applies logically to the research problem you are investigating. Here are some specific reading strategies to consider.

As You are Reading

Focus on information that is most relevant to the research problem; skim over the other parts.
As noted above, read content out of order! This isn't a novel; you want to start with the spoiler to quickly assess the relevance of the study.
Think critically about what you read and seek to build your own arguments; not everything may be entirely valid, examined effectively, or thoroughly investigated.
Look up the definitions of unfamiliar words, concepts, or terminology. A good scholarly source is Credo Reference .

Taking notes as you read will save time when you go back to examine your sources. Here are some suggestions:

Mark or highlight important text as you read [e.g., you can use the highlight text feature in a PDF document]
Take notes in the margins [e.g., Adobe Reader offers pop-up sticky notes].
Highlight important quotations; consider using different colors to differentiate between quotes and other types of important text.
Summarize key points about the study at the end of the paper. To save time, these can be in the form of a concise bulleted list of statements [e.g., intro has provides historical background; lit review has important sources; good conclusions].

Write down thoughts that come to mind that may help clarify your understanding of the research problem. Here are some examples of questions to ask yourself:

Do I understand all of the terminology and key concepts?
Do I understand the parts of this study most relevant to my topic?
What specific problem does the research address and why is it important?
Are there any issues or perspectives the author(s) did not consider?
Do I have any reason to question the validity or reliability of this research?
How do the findings relate to my research interests and to other works which I have read?

Adapted from text originally created by Holly Burt, Behavioral Sciences Librarian, USC Libraries, April 2018.

Another Reading Tip

When is it Important to Read the Entire Article or Research Paper

Laubepin argues, "Very few articles in a field are so important that every word needs to be read carefully." However, this implies that some studies are worth reading carefully. As painful and time-consuming as it may seem, there are valid reasons for reading a study in its entirety from beginning to end. Here are some examples:

Studies Published Very Recently . The author(s) of a recent, well written study will provide a survey of the most important or impactful prior research in the literature review section. This can establish an understanding of how scholars in the past addressed the research problem. In addition, the most recently published sources will highlight what is currently known and what gaps in understanding currently exist about a topic, usually in the form of the need for further research in the conclusion .
Surveys of the Research Problem . Some papers provide a comprehensive analytical overview of the research problem. Reading this type of study can help you understand underlying issues and discover why scholars have chosen to investigate the topic. This is particularly important if the study was published very recently because the author(s) should cite all or most of the key prior research on the topic. Note that, if it is a long-standing problem, there may be studies that specifically review the literature to identify gaps that remain. These studies often include the word review in their title [e.g., Hügel, Stephan, and Anna R. Davies. "Public Participation, Engagement, and Climate Change Adaptation: A Review of the Research Literature." Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 11 (July-August 2020): https://doi.org/10.1002/ wcc.645].
Highly Cited . If you keep coming across the same citation to a study while you are reviewing the literature, this implies it was foundational in establishing an understanding of the research problem or the study had a significant impact within the literature [positive or negative]. Carefully reading a highly cited source can help you understand how the topic emerged and motivated scholars to further investigate the problem. It also could be a study you need to cite as foundational in your own paper to demonstrate to the reader that you understand the roots of the problem.
Historical Overview . Knowing the historical background of a research problem may not be the focus of your analysis. Nevertheless, carefully reading a study that provides a thorough description and analysis of the history behind an event, issue, or phenomenon can add important context to understanding the topic and what aspect of the problem you may want to examine further.
Innovative Methodological Design . Some studies are significant and worth reading in their entirety because the author(s) designed a unique or innovative approach to researching the problem. This may justify reading the entire study because it can motivate you to think creatively about pursuing an alternative or non-traditional approach to examining your topic of interest. These types of studies are generally easy to identify because they are often cited in others works because of their unique approach to studying the research problem.
Cross-disciplinary Approach . R eviewing studies produced outside of your discipline is an essential component of investigating research problems in the social and behavioral sciences. Consider reading a study that was conducted by author(s) based in a different discipline [e.g., an anthropologist studying political cultures; a study of hiring practices in companies published in a sociology journal]. This approach can generate a new understanding or a unique perspective about the topic . If you are not sure how to search for studies published in a discipline outside of your major or of the course you are taking, contact a librarian for assistance.

Laubepin, Frederique. How to Read (and Understand) a Social Science Journal Article . Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ISPSR), 2013; Shon, Phillip Chong Ho. How to Read Journal Articles in the Social Sciences: A Very Practical Guide for Students . 2nd edition. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2015; Lockhart, Tara, and Mary Soliday. "The Critical Place of Reading in Writing Transfer (and Beyond): A Report of Student Experiences." Pedagogy 16 (2016): 23-37; Maguire, Moira, Ann Everitt Reynolds, and Brid Delahunt. "Reading to Be: The Role of Academic Reading in Emergent Academic and Professional Student Identities." Journal of University Teaching and Learning Practice 17 (2020): 5-12.

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Last Updated: May 7, 2024 9:40 AM
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How to read a scientific research paper

Affiliation.

1 Department of Anesthesiology, University of Virginia Health System, PO Box 800710, Charlottesville, VA 22908-0170, USA. [email protected]
PMID: 19796417

Reading is the most common way that adults learn. With the exponential growth in information, no one has time to read all they need. Reading original research, although difficult, is rewarding and important for growth. Building on past knowledge, the reader should select papers about which he already holds an opinion. Rather than starting at the beginning, this author suggests approaching a paper by reading the conclusions in the abstract first. The methods should be next reviewed, then the results--first in the abstract, and then the full paper. For efficiency, at each step, reasons should be sought not to read any further in the paper. By using this approach, new knowledge will be obtained and many papers will be evaluated, read, and considered.

Education, Medical, Continuing*
Information Dissemination
Peer Review, Research*
Periodicals as Topic*
Research Design

Inside eLife

Open Science: Why you should preprint your next paper

Open access
Copyright information

By George Currie, Content Manager at eLife

Preprinting is the act of sharing an early version of your research, often before journal-organised review. It helps you share your research with others quickly, establishes priority for your findings and can be a way to receive feedback from your community. Many organisations, including eLife and PreReview , are starting to offer and recognise peer reviewed preprints, or allow public discussion on preprints.

But what are the advantages of preprinting your next paper? Here are our five Fs of preprinting:

Preprinting is fast

Preprinting gets your work out into the world much faster, in days not months. No waiting around for reviewer feedback or time spent making revisions, your work is out there. Citable, sharable and with a DOI. Both reviews and revisions can be extremely valuable but it comes at the cost of time and slowing down science communication. Once your work is available others can use it, they can build on your ideas, they can use them to refine their ideas. Your work is pushing science forward.

Preprinting helps you be first

Preprinting establishes priority for your findings or ideas. Waiting for publication can be anxiety inducing but preprinting puts you in control of publication. You won’t have to worry that someone else is going to publish your breakthrough while you’re still waiting for reviews. When you next think about scooping it will be time for ice cream!

Preprinting is free

Nearly all preprint servers are completely free of charge. Free to you as an author, and free to you as a reader. No subscriptions, no APCs. At no cost other than the time to submit, you can ensure that the whole world has access to your research.

Most journals* now have fairly open policies regarding preprinting ahead of publication, so even if you’re publishing behind a paywall you can make a version available for everyone.

*it’s worth checking journal or publisher websites for current policies. You can find a list of policies and links on Wikipedia.

Preprinting enables feedback

Sharing early versions of work can be daunting, but getting feedback helps refine and polish your work. Informal feedback helps start the conversation around your research and shows that people are engaging with it. Public scrutiny and feedback at this stage is far more useful than on a Version of Record as you are still able to implement changes and this could even help reduce time working through peer review feedback later. To help ensure feedback is useful to authors, the FAST framework of preprint feedback suggests feedback should be focused, appropriate, specific and transparent.

Preprinting fights inequalities

Preprints help level the playing field. It’s not about you, your institution or what you can afford to pay. Your work stands on its own merits.

Because preprinting is accessible, free and without the gatekeeping mechanisms typical of journals it makes science communication far more democratic and less prone to structural or implicit biases present in traditional publishing. This gives scientific communities more power and control over how and what they communicate.

Bonus sixth F: How do you filter preprints?

For all the positives of preprinting, it does present a new challenge: how we filter them.

There’s a lot of research out there, it can be hard to keep up as it is. Adding preprints to the mix can make this overwhelming. How can you keep up with preprint literature and how do you know you can trust it?

Some preprint servers still undertake elements of editorial screening to make sure research meets basic standards, and some journals and organisations are focused on preprint review . Beyond this, there are platforms dedicated to preprint curation, such as Sciety and Prelights .

Sciety, developed by eLife, is a free platform that helps researchers highlight and distil the vast and growing preprint literature. It’s a public space for users to comment on preprints, create shareable lists and follow other users for their recommendations. This centralises important work already happening in blogs, private slacks and listservs and makes it available to a wider audience. And helps you find trusted, recommended research that meets your interests.

Where can I read or post preprints?

For research in the biological and medical sciences, bioRxiv and medRxiv are popular preprint servers. Though many more exist , catering for different subject areas and geographies.

ASAPbio Preprint infographics: post your preprint in 5 steps, publishing process, take action in support of preprints.

Image credit: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. Singh, Sumeet Pal, Ferguson, Christine, Ahmad, Umar, & Puebla, Iratxe. (2021). ASAPbio Preprint infographics: post your preprint in 5 steps, publishing process, take action in support of preprints. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5724096

What does preprinting mean (for science communication).

Preprinting has been popular in physics and maths for decades. While the uptake has been slower in biological and medical sciences it became an essential means of communication during the search for a COVID-19 vaccine.

As adoption grows, so does the potential for preprinting to radically change how we communicate science and the role publishers play in scientific discourse. It can level the playing field for researchers and accelerate scientific discoveries.

Unfortunately “preprinting” is a bit of a misnomer.

The “pre-” makes you think that something has to happen next – before it is “done”. And the “-printing” part supposes that the research is going to be made physical. Neither of these things need to be true and in today’s world they often aren’t.

Versions of record are a hangover of when research needed to be made final so a physical artefact could be created. With the technology we have now, the way we communicate science can better reflect the way science really works.

Preprints help science become a conversation among peers, sharing knowledge, iterating and self correcting faster and more fluidly. Rather than a focus on Versions of Record, final statements etched in stone, we could have a record of versions where our best current understanding is given prominence. Learn more about the benefits of preprinting with ASAPbio, and consider sharing your next biological or medical paper as a preprint.

Be the first to read new articles from eLife

Special Features

Vendor voice.

Some scientists can't stop using AI to write research papers

If you read about 'meticulous commendable intricacy' there's a chance a boffin had help.

Linguistic and statistical analyses of scientific articles suggest that generative AI may have been used to write an increasing amount of scientific literature.

Two academic papers assert that analyzing word choice in the corpus of science publications reveals an increasing usage of AI for writing research papers. One study , published in March by Andrew Gray of University College London in the UK, suggests at least one percent – 60,000 or more – of all papers published in 2023 were written at least partially by AI.

A second paper published in April by a Stanford University team in the US claims this figure might range between 6.3 and 17.5 percent, depending on the topic.

Both papers looked for certain words that large language models (LLMs) use habitually, such as “intricate,” “pivotal,” and “meticulously." By tracking the use of those words across scientific literature, and comparing this to words that aren't particularly favored by AI, the two studies say they can detect an increasing reliance on machine learning within the scientific publishing community.

In Gray's paper, the use of control words like "red," "conclusion," and "after" changed by a few percent from 2019 to 2023. The same was true of other certain adjectives and adverbs until 2023 (termed the post-LLM year by Gray).

In that year use of the words "meticulous," "commendable," and "intricate," rose by 59, 83, and 117 percent respectively, while their prevalence in scientific literature hardly changed between 2019 and 2022. The word with the single biggest increase in prevalence post-2022 was “meticulously”, up 137 percent.

The Stanford paper found similar phenomena, demonstrating a sudden increase for the words "realm," "showcasing," "intricate," and "pivotal." The former two were used about 80 percent more often than in 2021 and 2022, while the latter two were used around 120 and almost 160 percent more frequently respectively.

Beyond the hype, AI promises leg up for scientific research
AI researchers have started reviewing their peers using AI assistance
Boffins deem Google DeepMind's material discoveries rather shallow
Turns out AI chatbots are way more persuasive than humans

The researchers also considered word usage statistics in various scientific disciplines. Computer science and electrical engineering were ahead of the pack when it came to using AI-preferred language, while mathematics, physics, and papers published by the journal Nature, only saw increases of between five and 7.5 percent.

The Stanford bods also noted that authors posting more preprints, working in more crowded fields, and writing shorter papers seem to use AI more frequently. Their paper suggests that a general lack of time and a need to write as much as possible encourages the use of LLMs, which can help increase output.

Potentially the next big controversy in the scientific community

Using AI to help in the research process isn't anything new, and lots of boffins are open about utilizing AI to tweak experiments to achieve better results. However, using AI to actually write abstracts and other chunks of papers is very different, because the general expectation is that scientific articles are written by actual humans, not robots, and at least a couple of publishers consider using LLMs to write papers to be scientific misconduct.

Using AI models can be very risky as they often produce inaccurate text, the very thing scientific literature is not supposed to do. AI models can even fabricate quotations and citations, an occurrence that infamously got two New York attorneys in trouble for citing cases ChatGPT had dreamed up.

"Authors who are using LLM-generated text must be pressured to disclose this or to think twice about whether doing so is appropriate in the first place, as a matter of basic research integrity," University College London’s Gray opined.

The Stanford researchers also raised similar concerns, writing that use of generative AI in scientific literature could create "risks to the security and independence of scientific practice." ®

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Physicists arrange atoms in extremely close proximity

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On top is a green cloud of atoms point up, and on bottom is a blue cloud of atoms pointing down. In between the clouds are lines representing a magnetic field repelling the atoms.

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Proximity is key for many quantum phenomena, as interactions between atoms are stronger when the particles are close. In many quantum simulators, scientists arrange atoms as close together as possible to explore exotic states of matter and build new quantum materials.

They typically do this by cooling the atoms to a stand-still, then using laser light to position the particles as close as 500 nanometers apart — a limit that is set by the wavelength of light. Now, MIT physicists have developed a technique that allows them to arrange atoms in much closer proximity, down to a mere 50 nanometers. For context, a red blood cell is about 1,000 nanometers wide.

The physicists demonstrated the new approach in experiments with dysprosium, which is the most magnetic atom in nature. They used the new approach to manipulate two layers of dysprosium atoms, and positioned the layers precisely 50 nanometers apart. At this extreme proximity, the magnetic interactions were 1,000 times stronger than if the layers were separated by 500 nanometers.

What’s more, the scientists were able to measure two new effects caused by the atoms’ proximity. Their enhanced magnetic forces caused “thermalization,” or the transfer of heat from one layer to another, as well as synchronized oscillations between layers. These effects petered out as the layers were spaced farther apart.

“We have gone from positioning atoms from 500 nanometers to 50 nanometers apart, and there is a lot you can do with this,” says Wolfgang Ketterle, the John D. MacArthur Professor of Physics at MIT. “At 50 nanometers, the behavior of atoms is so much different that we’re really entering a new regime here.”

Ketterle and his colleagues say the new approach can be applied to many other atoms to study quantum phenomena. For their part, the group plans to use the technique to manipulate atoms into configurations that could generate the first purely magnetic quantum gate — a key building block for a new type of quantum computer.

The team has published their results today in the journal Science . The study’s co-authors include lead author and physics graduate student Li Du, along with Pierre Barral, Michael Cantara, Julius de Hond, and Yu-Kun Lu — all members of the MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms, the Department of Physics, and the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT.

Peaks and valleys

To manipulate and arrange atoms, physicists typically first cool a cloud of atoms to temperatures approaching absolute zero, then use a system of laser beams to corral the atoms into an optical trap.

Laser light is an electromagnetic wave with a specific wavelength (the distance between maxima of the electric field) and frequency. The wavelength limits the smallest pattern into which light can be shaped to typically 500 nanometers, the so-called optical resolution limit. Since atoms are attracted by laser light of certain frequencies, atoms will be positioned at the points of peak laser intensity. For this reason, existing techniques have been limited in how close they can position atomic particles, and could not be used to explore phenomena that happen at much shorter distances.

“Conventional techniques stop at 500 nanometers, limited not by the atoms but by the wavelength of light,” Ketterle explains. “We have found now a new trick with light where we can break through that limit.”

The team’s new approach, like current techniques, starts by cooling a cloud of atoms — in this case, to about 1 microkelvin, just a hair above absolute zero — at which point, the atoms come to a near-standstill. Physicists can then use lasers to move the frozen particles into desired configurations.

Then, Du and his collaborators worked with two laser beams, each with a different frequency, or color, and circular polarization, or direction of the laser’s electric field. When the two beams travel through a super-cooled cloud of atoms, the atoms can orient their spin in opposite directions, following either of the two lasers’ polarization. The result is that the beams produce two groups of the same atoms, only with opposite spins.

Each laser beam formed a standing wave, a periodic pattern of electric field intensity with a spatial period of 500 nanometers. Due to their different polarizations, each standing wave attracted and corralled one of two groups of atoms, depending on their spin. The lasers could be overlaid and tuned such that the distance between their respective peaks is as small as 50 nanometers, meaning that the atoms gravitating to each respective laser’s peaks would be separated by the same 50 nanometers.

But in order for this to happen, the lasers would have to be extremely stable and immune to all external noise, such as from shaking or even breathing on the experiment. The team realized they could stabilize both lasers by directing them through an optical fiber, which served to lock the light beams in place in relation to each other.

“The idea of sending both beams through the optical fiber meant the whole machine could shake violently, but the two laser beams stayed absolutely stable with respect to each others,” Du says.

Magnetic forces at close range

As a first test of their new technique, the team used atoms of dysprosium — a rare-earth metal that is one of the strongest magnetic elements in the periodic table, particularly at ultracold temperatures. However, at the scale of atoms, the element’s magnetic interactions are relatively weak at distances of even 500 nanometers. As with common refrigerator magnets, the magnetic attraction between atoms increases with proximity, and the scientists suspected that if their new technique could space dysprosium atoms as close as 50 nanometers apart, they might observe the emergence of otherwise weak interactions between the magnetic atoms.

“We could suddenly have magnetic interactions, which used to be almost neglible but now are really strong,” Ketterle says.

The team applied their technique to dysprosium, first super-cooling the atoms, then passing two lasers through to split the atoms into two spin groups, or layers. They then directed the lasers through an optical fiber to stabilize them, and found that indeed, the two layers of dysprosium atoms gravitated to their respective laser peaks, which in effect separated the layers of atoms by 50 nanometers — the closest distance that any ultracold atom experiment has been able to achieve.

At this extremely close proximity, the atoms’ natural magnetic interactions were significantly enhanced, and were 1,000 times stronger than if they were positioned 500 nanometers apart. The team observed that these interactions resulted in two novel quantum phenomena: collective oscillation, in which one layer’s vibrations caused the other layer to vibrate in sync; and thermalization, in which one layer transferred heat to the other, purely through magnetic fluctuations in the atoms.

“Until now, heat between atoms could only by exchanged when they were in the same physical space and could collide,” Du notes. “Now we have seen atomic layers, separated by vacuum, and they exchange heat via fluctuating magnetic fields.”

The team’s results introduce a new technique that can be used to position many types of atom in close proximity. They also show that atoms, placed close enough together, can exhibit interesting quantum phenomena, that could be harnessed to build new quantum materials, and potentially, magnetically-driven atomic systems for quantum computers.

“We are really bringing super-resolution methods to the field, and it will become a general tool for doing quantum simulations,” Ketterle says. “There are many variants possible, which we are working on.”

This research was funded, in part, by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Defense.

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Physicists arrange atoms in extremely close proximity
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How to read and understand a scientific paper

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