How
to Read a Scientific Research Papers
Teacher's
Guide
See
below for student guide and printer-friendly
student guide
Introduction
There are many advantages to having undergraduates
read primary literature (Epstein, 1972):
• Articles have a vividness
that is seldom found in a text, so students get excited
by them.
• Articles lend themselves
to critical, analytical thinking.
• Students feel smart and
powerful when they read original sources.
• Primary articles are a wonderful
adjunct to laboratory exercises.
• Articles reveal the scientific
process far better than secondary sources.
Choosing appropriate
articles
It is important to choose articles that
are appropriate for your students, looking at conceptual
depth, vocabulary, and accessibility of the experimental
and statistical techniques. Of these considerations,
vocabulary is perhaps the least important, especially
if you follow the suggestions below for introducing students
to the new words. It is amazing what students can and do
read, if they are given the tools to do so. Conceptual
depth refers to the difficulty of the concepts important
to the article. For example, an article on transcriptional
factors in white blood cells requires students to understand
some molecular biology. Such an article could be perfect
for a cell biology course, but might be too advanced for
basic biology. In addition to the difficulty of the
main ideas addressed, the article may present some experimental
and statistical techniques that are just too hard to
grasp. For example, articles on research in epidemiology,
such as the relationship of heart attacks to diet, are often
wonderfully accessible, except when the authors use logistical
regression. Or an article on evolutionary relationships
among protein molecules might be quite readable, except
for the PCR techniques. In both these cases, you could
decide to use the article anyway, if you have carefully
figured out how to present the difficult techniques in a
reasonably palatable way.
Classroom tips
In preparing your students to read articles
for the first time, you will usually need to allocate a
good amount of class time for the first article, but this
experience should prepare them to be able to be a lot more
independent in the future. Here are some methods that
faculty at Hampshire have found successful for first-time
readers of research articles.
A. Assignment 1: Skimming
and vocabulary When you first assign the article,
talk it up, saying how powerful students will feel when
they can read the original literature and how exciting it
is to read the papers scientists write for one another.
Acknowledge that it will not be easy, but reassure students
that you have a system that will help them understand.
Briefly outline the four steps (see student guide):
All students need to have copies of the
paper so that they may mark it up freely. Send them
away with the first assignment to do step 1 (skimming) and
part of step 2 (vocabulary). What they should do is
to underline or highlight every word and phrase they
don't understand and make a list, the longer the better.
The next class period will be devoted to giving them an
understanding of the vocabulary.
B. First class discussion:
vocabulary. Plan to spend the entire
class period defining terms they do not understand.
It seems time-consuming, but in my experience it is completely
worthwhile. Ask students to contribute words or phrases
to be defined. Encourage each student to name at least
one term that needs defining, to put them all on a more
equal footing. (If students are asked to go and look
up terms on this first paper, unless they are all at a high
level, the exercise tends to split them further, with the
more advanced students outstripping the others.) It is useful
to write all terms on the board first, as the students name
them, and to organize them by category (e.g., technique
words from Methods, anatomical terms, chemicals).
After most of the words have been listed, you may want to
ask them about some others that they may have ignored.
Then choose whatever order seems best to you (doing simple
terms first often is helpful) and define, define, explain,
explain. Remember, you aren't explaining the paper,
just the vocabulary.
C. Second assignment:
comprehension and analysis. The next
assignment is to read the paper for comprehension.
At this point, it is very useful to assign students to answer
questions on the paper. The response questions are
given below.
D. Second discussion: comprehension
and analysis. Students should arrive
in class with typed answers to the response questions and
with the article in hand. Because they have already
tried to answer the questions, it can be a Ňteachable momentÓ
when they are ready to learn more. There are many ways to
structure the discussion to aid studentsŐ comprehension
and reflection. The whole class can go over the answers
or small groups can work together.
There are two tricks I like to use here:
•Assign each response question
to one small group of students. They pool their answers,
check with me, and put their best responses on large sheets
of paper to present to the class.
•Encourage each student to
add to his/her typed answers by writing in the margins,
using information and analysis gained in class. That
way, they can correct themselves.
This is also the opportunity to set the
article in a larger context, to understand its relation
to text material, and to encourage students to think beyond
the outlines of the article, examining other factors that
may not have been explored in the research.
reference
H.T. Epstein. 1972. An experiment
in education. Nature 235 203-5.
Response Paper Questions about
the primary article
Printer-friendly
version of questions
Instructions
For the primary paper given, answer each
of the questions below and explain your answers.
Make sure your readers will be able to see what you understand
about this piece of primary literature.
The Questions
• What question is addressed
by this research? Explain the relevant past research
and the ideas that led to this question.
• What hypothesis was investigated
in this study? Explain how it is related to the research
question you discussed in #1 above.
• How was the study set up?
Explain why it was set up this way.
• What data were collected?
Explain why the authors chose these particular data to collect.
• What were the results?
• Explain how well the results
do (or do not) support the hypothesis.
• Explain any alternative
explanations for the findings (your own ideas and/or the
authorŐs).
• What further research does
this study suggest (to you and/or the author)?
Explain why it should be conducted.
Research in Education and Learning, Cognitive
Science, Hampshire College, devised these questions in collaboration
with the Natural Science faculty.
HOW
TO READ a Scientific Research Paper
A
FOUR-STEP GUIDE FOR STUDENTS
introduction
Reading research papers ("primary
articles") is partly a matter of experience and skill,
and partly learning the specific vocabulary of a field.
First of all, DON'T PANIC! If you approach it step
by step, even an impossible-looking paper can be understood.
the four steps: Skimming, vocabulary,
comprehension, and analysis.
1. Skimming. Skim
the paper quickly, noting basics like headings, figures
and the like. This takes just a few minutes.
You're not trying to understand it yet, you just need to
get an overview of what's ahead.
2. Vocabulary. Go
through the paper word by word and line by line, underlining
or highlighting every word and phrase you don't understand.
Don't worry if there are a lot of words you donŐt know.
There are several things you might do with
these underlined words and phrases, depending upon the nature
of the words. You can
a) Look
up simple words and phrases. Often the problem
is simply unfamiliar vocabulary--what's a lateral malleolus,
or a christa, or the semilunar valve?
The first and best source is often a textbook, either
your course text or another one you find. Textbook
glossaries tend to give definitions that are the most useful
in that they are in the context of the subject. Better
yet, look up the term in the index of the text, and you
may find an illustration showing just what that thing is
and what it does in the body. A medical or
biological dictionary is also a good place to look
for definitions. Your ordinary shelf dictionary is
not a good source, because the definitions may not be precise
enough or may not reflect the way in which scientists use
a word (for example "efficiency" has a common
definition, but the scientific definition is much more precise.)
b) Get an understanding
from the context in which the words or phrase is used.
Often words that are used to describe the procedures used
in an experiment can be understood from the context, and
may be very specific to the paper you are reading. Examples
are the "lithium-free control group" in a rat
experiment or the "carotene extraction procedure"
in a biochemical experiment. Of course, you should
be careful when deciding that you understand a word from
its context, because it might not mean what you think.
c) Flag the
phrase as belonging to one of the major concepts of the
paper--it's bigger than a vocabulary question.
For example, a paper about biomechanics kept mentioning
the "inherent elasticity" of muscles. This
referred to the muscles' resistance to stretch when
they were not contracting, but it also was one of the central
concepts around which the paper revolved--the question whether
"inherent elasticity" was sufficient to keep people
standing upright or if instead muscles needed to actively
contract.
3. Comprehension,
section by section. Try to deal with all
the words and phrases, although a few technical terms in
the Methods section might remain. Now go back and
read the whole paper, section by section, for comprehension.
In the Introduction, note the overall
context. What larger question is this study a part
of? What does the author say about previous research?
What is the hypothesis of the paper and how will it be tested?
In the Methods, try to get a clear
picture of what was done at each step. What was actually
measured and how was it measured? It is a good idea
to make an outline and/or sketch of the procedures and instruments.
Keep notes of your questions; some of them may be simply
technical, but others may point to more fundamental considerations
that you will use for reflection and criticism below.
In Results look carefully at the
figures and tables, as they are the heart of most papers.
A scientist will often read the figures and tables before
deciding whether it is worthwhile to read the rest of the
article! What does it mean to "understand"
a figure? You understand a figure when you can
redraw it and explain it in plain language.
The Discussion includes the conclusions
that the author would like to draw from the data.
In some papers, this section contains a lot of interpretation
and is very important. In any case, this is usually
where the author reflects on the work and its meaning in
relation to other findings and to the field in general.
4. Analysis.
After you understand the article and can summarize it, then
you can return to broader questions and draw your own conclusions.
It is very useful to keep track of your questions as you
go along, returning to see whether they have been answered.
Often, the simple questions may contain the seeds of very
deep thoughts about the work--for example, "Why did
the authors use a questionnaire at the end of the menstrual
cycle to find out about premenstrual tension? Wouldn't
subjects forget or have trouble recalling by the end of
the cycle?"
Here are some questions that may be useful
in analyzing various kinds of research papers:
Introduction:
• What is the overall
purpose of the research?
• How does the research
fit into the context of its field? Is it, for example,
attempting to settle a controversy? show the validity
of a new technique? open up a new field of inquiry?
• Do you agree with
the author's rationale for studying the question with this
particular methodology?
Methods:
• Were the measurements
appropriate for the questions the researcher was approaching?
• How is the study controlled?
are there control groups? If so, are they exactly
comparable to the experimental groups?
• Often, researchers
need to use "indicators" because they cannot measure
something directly--for example, using babies' birthweight
to indicate nutritional status. Were the measures
in this research clearly related to the variables in which
the researchers (or you) were interested?
• If human subjects
were studied, did they accurately represent the populations
under study?
Results
• What is the one major
finding?
• Were enough of the
data presented so that you feel you can judge for yourself
how the experiment turned out?
• Did you see patterns
or trends in the data that the author did not mention?
Were there problems in data interpretation that were not
addressed?
Discussion
• Do you agree with
the conclusions drawn from the data?
• Are these conclusions
over-generalized or appropriately careful?
• Are there alternative
interpretations of the data?
• What further experiments
can you think of, to continue the research or to answer
remaining questions?
