How to quickly read a scientific paper | by Christophe Pere | Medium

Reading an article is not done in this order. An article is complex, uses a very technical vocabulary and develops a sophisticated methodology (Northcentral University, 2019). To better understand the difficulty and technical content of an article, a quick and effective method is the Skim and Take notes method (Purugganan & Hewitt, 2004).

1- Read the abstract

a. What was done and what was found?

b. Does the author provide specific results? Are they relevant?

2- Read the discussion and/or conclusion

a. Summarizes the important results

b. Give reasons for the conclusion

c. Questions: Do you agree? Are the results useful?

3- Read the introduction

a. Explanation on the motivations and importance of research

b. Provided a state of the art work on the domain

c. Questions: Do you understand the state of the art? Do you need to explore the references to get more information?

4- Read the results

a. Provide the data used to carry out the study and can help you in your own research

b. Contains figures and tables for a simple and effective vision of the results

c. Questions: Figures — Do you understand the axes use? Their units? Do the curves make sense?

5- Read the methods

a. By far the most complex part because it contains the details, theory and explanations of the experiment or algorithm developed

b. Question: Can you replicate the experiment or the algorithm?