Biology

Reading Scientific Papers

Tips for Reading Primary Literature by Laura Wenk and Loel Tronsky

Even though the vocabulary and format may feel intimidating at first, you’ll soon get used to both as you learn more about the subject and read more papers on related topics. Also, you’ll have more questions—some about content or technique and others about how the work was done.

Most primary articles begin with an abstract, which summarizes the major points of the study (what was asked, what was done, what was learned). If the subject is new to you, the abstract may be hard to understand because it doesn’t explain much. It sometimes helps to scan an abstract to see if the research is even close to what you want to know.

The introduction is usually helpful because it sets out the rationale for this study by telling you four things:

• the general topic the paper addresses
• previous work that led to the question asked in this study (citations to studies included in the bibliography are given, but few details of that work are mentioned)
• the question(s) the study you are reading is designed to address
• the author's hypotehsis(es)

The first time you read the paper, you might want to skip from the introduction to the discussion to get a quick idea about what they conclude.

The methods section often has lots of technical details, so at first, focus on two things:

• An overall picture of the experimental design. Sometimes this information is set out more clearly in the introduction or the abstract, but it’s important for you to step back from the details and figure out why they designed the study as they did (more about this in the handout on experimental design).
• Details about each step of the experiment. Some of these - like how they chose their subjects and how many subjects they studied and over what period of time - will be important to understand right away; others have more detail than you need to worry about). The results section shows the results of tests described in the methods section. It shouldn’t have much in the way of conclusions. What it will have are tables, graphs, or diagrams.

The results section shows the results of tests described in the methods section. It shouldn’t have much in the way of conclusions. What it will have are tables, graphs, or diagrams. The text of the results discusses some of what is in those figures, but you’ll need to look closely at the tables and graphs to really understand the results.

The next section is generally called discussion or conclusions. That’s where the authors remind you of the original question(s) they were asking and address how well they think their data answered those questions. They may refer to other studies that help explain some of what they found or expected to find and didn’t. They may speculate in this section about what their results might mean (including any alternative explanations) and what further studies they believe need to be done and why.

The final section is the bibliography. This is very useful as you’re getting into a new topic. It tells you who else is working in the field and what work was done earlier that led to this study.

Wenk, L., & Tronsky, L. (2011). First-year students benefit from reading primary research articles. Journal of College Science Teaching, 40(4), 60-67.

Additional Tips

Writing Scientific Papers