Rc001 Short Answer

As you moved from the Application Assignment page to this document, you might have asked yourself: “Why do I need to learn how to read research articles?” Think about it this way: Why is it to your advantage to be able to read at all? One of the main reasons is that being literate makes you independent. Other people may not read the whole story to you, or they may only provide you with selected excerpts of a report and therefore keep you from knowing all the facts. When you can read, you are in control of the information you receive. Likewise, if you are a professional who does not know how to read published research, you are, at best, dependent on others to interpret research results for you, i.e., you only obtain filtered, second-hand knowledge; at worst, you never read current research and miss a significant chance of professional growth and development.

Students as well as professionals without extensive training in statistics or research methodology often shy away from formal research articles, thinking that they lack the skills to read and understand the seemingly complicated language of research. However, the good news is that you can read and understand any research article even if you have never had a course in statistics or research methodology. Researchers in just about any field of study follow an established pattern when they submit a research article for publication. The key for you is to know this pattern, know which parts of a research article you do not have to read—yes, you can safely skip a large portion of any research article and still know exactly what the research was all about— and which parts you need to study carefully.

This document is designed to explain this pattern to you, teach you how to focus your reading, and give you the confidence to make reading research articles a welcome part of your professional life. These are the three sections of this document:

1. The Pattern of Research Articles

2. The Parts of Research Articles, and their Meaning

3. What to Read—What to Skip—What to Read Again

1. THE PATTERN OF RESEARCH ARTICLES

Most research articles are constructed in the following way: First, there is an Abstract, followed by an Introduction. The next section is called Methods, and is usually divided in subsections labeled Participants, Procedure, Measures, and Results. The final sections are called Discussion and Conclusion, although sometimes the conclusion section is just part of the discussion section and vice versa.

The main reason why the majority of research articles follow this pattern is because it represents the natural flow of the research process. The exception is the Abstract which is a very condensed summary of the whole research process, usually written at the conclusion of the research but appearing at the beginning of the published article. Even though you will not read most of the sections of a research article, as a professional you need to understand the purpose of each section and why as a rule you need not read a specific section until you are properly trained.

2. THE PARTS OF RESEARCH ARTICLES, AND THEIR MEANING

INTRODUCTION: Researchers systematically lay out the reasons why they conducted a particular study. Part of the introduction is a lengthy discussion of what other people in the field already found out about the topic of the study. This is similar to a literature review. When you glance through this section, you will see a great number of citations of other researchers’ studies. There are several good reasons to spend that much time talking about other people’s work. Researchers need to show that they have read and understood what has already been discovered in their field. They need to set the stage for their own research, provide a reasonable context for it, and show that they have taken previous findings into account. It is also an effective way to clue the reader into what is already known about the topic of this investigation. Finally, researchers can use this section to point out what key questions about a topic have not yet been addressed by previous research and why their own research is important. The last

paragraph of the introduction typically contains a brief statement describing the purpose of the study. This is usually a description of the study’s scope based on the original research question. Any research study generally begins with the formulation of a question about which the researchers want to learn more.

The next sections are meant to make the research process transparent and replicable. What does transparency and being replicable mean, and why are these two conditions so vital to the research process? One of the goals of research in any field is to replicate other people’s research in order to establish consistency. Maybe someone’s results were just a fluke; maybe there is actually a pattern of results emerging. The more often other researchers can produce the same or at least very similar results as the original researchers, the more likely it is that the original results were not just a coincidence. In order for others to repeat a study, i.e., to replicate it, clear instructions on how to conduct the study need to exist. Describing in detail the “who, where, when, and what” of a research study means that the research process has been made transparent. Therefore, the more transparent the research process is, the better the chances are for successful replication.

METHODS: The methods section describes details of how the study was constructed, and it contains language specific to statistics. Most method sections contain these subsections: Participants, Design, Procedure, Measures.

PARTICIPANTS: This subsection tells you who participated in the study. This is quite important information for you. Imagine you are interested in finding out more about infant empathy. You conduct a library search using the key words “empathy” and “infant”, and the results show 10 articles published this year that fit these criteria. If you took a look at the “Participant” section right away, you would notice that 8 of the 10 articles you found used college students as participants. The “infant” part was merely a reference somewhere in the introduction. By checking out the participants so early in your reading process, you can immediately determine that these eight articles are pretty useless for your purposes. You are already saving yourself a lot of time. The untrained reader would have to struggle unnecessarily through each article only to find this out much later.

DESIGN/PROCEDURE: In these subsections, researchers describe step by step how the research was conducted, where it took place, when it took place, under what circumstances it took place, and what exactly happened. If you were a researcher evaluating the merits of someone’s research, you would carefully read this section to learn more about the research plan.

MEASURES: Any device used to gather data is listed and described in this section. This includes any tests, rating scales, questionnaires and other measures. If you were a beginning researcher, this section would interest you because it helps you understand what measures are commonly used to investigate a specific research topic. This information, together with the purpose of your research, would help you determine whether to use some of the same measures because their value has already been established, or to choose different measures.

RESULTS: In this section, the results of the research are presented. If you are untrained in research methodology, this section probably appears to you as if written in a foreign language. On top of that, it usually contains numbers, figures, or tables, all of which can add to the confusion. For a fellow researcher, however, this section simply documents the result of the study in research-specific terminology.

DISCUSSION: Consider the discussion section the English translation of the results section. It contains the same results but in a language that is relatively free of statistical terminology. Here, researchers talk about their findings in more general terms.

CONCLUSIONS: In this section, researchers summarize the results one more time and discuss the implications of the study. Sometimes, the conclusions contain references to limitations of the study. Occasionally, conclusions and discussion are merged into one section.

3. WHAT TO READ—WHAT TO SKIP—WHAT TO READ AGAIN

1. First, read the title of the article. Read it again and again. Look up the words you do not understand. Read the title until you understand it. You can save yourself time right from the beginning if you take care in understanding the title of a study. At this point, you can already make a preliminary decision if this article is one that fits your needs.

2. Read the abstract. Read it as carefully as the title. Well written abstracts tell you what the study is about. As they are very condensed paragraphs, they are not easy to read. Time spent on understanding abstracts is also time well spent. The earlier you can determine if an article is really about the topic you want to read about, the more time you save yourself in the long run.

3. If the abstract does not provide the information about the participants, jump ahead to the participant section and make sure the article still fits your needs.

Now that you have determined that an article most likely fits your needs, it is time to know what to skip and what to read.

4. You can skip most of the introduction. What you want to know next concerns the scope of the research reported in the article—what exactly was the research question, and what did the researchers hope to find out? In other words: What was the purpose of this study? You find this information typically in the last paragraph of the Introduction. Skip right to the end of the Introduction and search for sentences like these: “The purpose of this study…” or “Our hypothesis was...” or “We addressed the following questions…” or something similar. Read this paragraph carefully.

5. As you already read earlier who the participants were, skip the entire participant section.

Now to the great news that will make reading research articles simple, manageable, and enjoyable:

6. Unless you are trained in research methodology, you may safely skip the entire Design/Procedure section, the entire Measures section, as well as the entire Results section.

7. Next, spend a good amount of time carefully reading and evaluating the discussion and conclusion sections. Pay particular attention to the conclusions as they typically contain the most precise summary of the findings as well as implications for the field and for future research.

8. Take some time to reflect on what you read. If you can summarize the research in your own words, you have understood it. If you are still not quite sure, repeat the steps.

Following this plan will greatly reduce your time spent reading research articles, increase your understanding of research articles to almost 100%, and reduce your anxiety level to 0%.

(*) Note: Not all published research articles follow this formal format. Most studies using quantitative methods, and especially experimental and quasi-experimental studies, use the formal reporting style to which this article refers. There exists, however, other published research that is reported in a less formal style. This is primarily the case for research using qualitative methods or research that is more theoretical or philosophical in nature. Such reports are generally written in a more conversational tone and do not need these specific reading instructions.