READING THE ARTICLES

Reading research articles is different from other types of reading. It tends to be slow and sometimes frustrating if you are not familiar with the topic and the language of the field. A good understanding of the research literature is a necessary prerequisite for writing a competent review article yourself. Understanding the literature requires you to read, re-read, and mentally digest complex ideas.

How to Proceed

Read the easier articles first. Difficult, condensed, or poorly written articles will be easier to understand if you read them last.

Scan the article. Identify (1) the research question, (2) specific hypotheses, (3) the findings, and (4) how the findings were interpreted. It may help to use a summary sheet to list these key points for each article.

For the initial scan, don’t read the articles straight through or you’ll get bogged down in detail. Read each section on its own until you understand it. First, look at just the Abstract to get an overview of the study. How you proceed from here is entirely up to you. You may want to read the Introduction to get a quick picture of the background and hypotheses, then skip to the tables and figures in the Results, then scan the Discussion to get a general idea of how the results were reconciled to the hypotheses.

Jot down the main conclusion of each article, either on your summary sheet or next to the abstract, so that you can see it at a glance. This quick summary will later help you to incorporate each article into your paper.

Read for depth. After you have an idea of the main ideas in each article, identify the precise methods used and the theories tested. An in-depth understanding is necessary for comparing the work of different researchers. A careful reading will reveal subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) differences in theoretical outlook. For example, you should notice some overlap among articles in the work cited, but how do different authors cite the same work? One author (a supporter of an earlier author’s work) may explain the method of the earlier study, delineate its results, and cite it repeatedly; a less enthusiastic author may simply include the earlier study as part of a long list of previous studies.

Use such clues to discern differences in experimenter outlook. This exercise should be the most interesting part of your research, and your ability to write about them can enliven your literature review. Allow enough time. Before you can write about research, you have to evaluate it, which means that you first have to understand it. You have to digest it in order to understand it, which requires that you read it, thoroughly.

This takes more time than many students realize.