📚How to Read an Academic Paper📚
"The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go." —Dr. Seuss *̥˚✧
Reading an academic paper can be as much of a challenge as finding the source in the first place, if not more so. Knowing how to approach the process can help take you from struggling through it, to learning what you need to know in the least terrible way possible.
Structure of a Paper
Academic papers tend to follow a similar format. APA is as follows:
Title
The name of the paper, authors, dates, etc.
Abstract
A short summary of the paper.
Introduction
Introducing the paper. Sometimes this is written before the experiment starts. You often find the hypothesis here for an experiment. Sometimes it’s written after, but they’ll usually write it as if it was written before.
Methods and Materials
How they did it and what they used.
Results of the Study
What they found and how they analyzed it.
Discussion
What they concluded from the results and why, often with sources from other similar papers.
Conclusion
What this means and what they concluded.
(No Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion [IMRaD] you are most certainly not RAD. >:( )
How to Read Papers by Type
Different papers from different fields can present unique challenges to reading and understanding.
Start with the abstract. Once you’re done reading the abstract mosey on down to the conclusion! Ignore the middle bits! Most of the time the middle bits are there to tell other researchers “I gotta make sure this is up to the standard of academic research!” Once you’ve read it once you can go back to the Method and judge how they performed it. However, at first this is a lot so go read the conclusion! It should be short, sweet, and tell you what they have spent the last so-and-so pages arguing. This will make it easier to understand.
It may seem counterintuitive to go in this order because we are taught to read books top-to-bottom left-to-right, but academia is full of clowns who speak in code.
Humanities Papers
Humanities papers are the most likely to dunk the format of a research paper. They are also usually based on the researcher’s interpretation of a primary source.
Because humanities papers are often based on the researchers' (albeit very educated) opinion it lends itself to a critical analysis of everything from translation to cultural or social bias from the researcher much more easily. (What primary sources did they base their conclusions on? Would you have done the same? What have other researchers said? In the cultural context of the time, does this translation make sense?) However, this tends to come after you’ve successfully understood what the researcher is trying to say.
Primary Source
A primary source is first-hand knowledge of something. These can include a writing from a time period by someone who was there, a record made at the time, a photograph, or even an artifact.
Secondary Source
A secondary source is second-hand knowledge. These are the papers written on the subject, textbooks, and accounts written by the people who were not around when it happened. They are not inherently worse than secondary sources, and are very important for spreading knowledge, but research based on secondary sources tends to be a compilation of a lot of research rather than direct investigations. [See: Historiographies. Synthesized studies. Meta Analysis.]
Scientific Papers
The abstract is your best best friend!!! They are not hiding the ball, it’s in the abstract. Then once again take yourself on a trip to the conclusion. Scientific papers almost never deviate from this format. Read it once, twice, and thrice again until you understand what the abstract is saying. This will help you understand the whole paper better.
Additional Complications for Scientific Papers
Experimental design can be, and has been, the subject of many an entire college semester for many people. Don’t expect to understand it outright if you’re new! For the results of most studies, the relevant concept is going to be "statistical significance". This is the probability that the results were found by chance. It is generally decided ahead of time based on what is being measured and notated similarly to p<.05. This means that the statistical probability of getting those results by pure coincidence is small enough to be significant.
Often in the discussion section you’ll see the author talk about their sample size, their potential biases, and the limitations of their experimental design (if they don’t the other academics will laugh at them). While you can look at this yourself and decide, this often gives a good idea of where there could be room for error.
Qualitative vs Quantitative
Qualitative data is the how, what, and why of research. Quantitative is the numerical measurements. [Think “quality vs quantity”.] There are different statistical terms and analyses for these different types of measurements, but that could be a whole course, let alone document, in and of itself. They use big words like they’re being sponsored by WebMD and Webster both.
Think of it like this: if you do an experiment and adding something to someone’s drink causes it to taste sweeter, that’s a qualitative measurement. If you’re adding something to someone’s drink and it raises their blood pressure from 100 to 120, that’s a quantitative measurement. Differentiating between them can be tricky, but a good tip to keep in mind is if it’s studies with people is that qualitative research is usually done with small groups of people - often 100 people or less, while quantitative research will often be upwards of the hundreds. This is because with quantitative research you often need large sample sizes for the data to be meaningful.
There are many types of qualitative research, including interviews, ethnographies, oral history, case studies, focus groups, record keeping, different kinds of observations, etc, while on the quantitative research side of things, we have our surveys, descriptive research, experimental research, correlational research, comparative-causal research, and more.
Causing you Problems
Those are the general rules and advice, now let's talk about how they are broken.
Style
The structure of an academic paper differs by style. APA sticks to this format very strictly. However, Chicago (my mortal enemy) is going to have footnotes to contend with, but could still have an abstract and a conclusion. If it has neither of those, lament them, shame them, and curse the author to the pit before skirt skirting your way to the first paragraph (approximately the abstract or introduction), and the last two or three paragraphs (approximately the conclusion). They tend to have generally the same information as would be found in a labeled heading.
The code clowns not only said “make it complicated”, they made it complicated across several different paper writing formats. If by some unholy tragedy you find a writing in MLA? Bite the author with your real teeth, and hope your highschool prepared you for this. At the very least MLA tends to be easier to read by starting at the beginning.
Jargon
Academic papers are often incredibly dense! Academia knows this! Please don’t be afraid to look up words you don’t necessarily understand! It’s not shameful! Shame them for using big words, like the pompous elites they are, and pull out a dictionary. Understanding is important! If all else fails, no one needs to know you looked up a word, you can just do a quick Google search and look like a pro. I do it all the time.
Plus there are often tons of educational materials for learning academic jargon because no one is born educated. They had to learn it, they are just expecting their audience to be someone who has already gotten a degree on the subject. It’s dense and boring, “no one else is reading this shit, surely,” they think while dunking a donut in a cup of hot Red Bull.
