Reading Empirical Journal Articles

 

Reading psychological research articles takes some practice, but it isn’t impossible. Hopefully these tips will help.  There are different kinds of research articles with different goals (see APA Manual, p. 4-6). However, you can’t really read any journal article in the same way you would read a textbook. All journal articles tend to be very dense. It is usually very difficult, in a single reading, to understand everything the author is trying to convey, much less remember it. So instead, we tend to read articles with a particular goal in mind (e.g., what research methods have been used to look at this subject, or how did they measure this particular variable), and we often read them more than once. If our goal changes later, we read it again.

 

In addition to reading journal articles more than once, we often read the various sections in different orders than they appear and/or more or less carefully. This is especially true of empirical articles reporting on one or more studies.

 

There are various strategies to reading empirical articles.  Always read the title and the abstract first to give yourself a vague notion of what to expect.  Also thumb through the article noting headings, number of studies, where the “General” Discussion section is and so forth. Again, this is just to orient you – do NOT panic or worry about immediately understanding anything.

 

Possible Goal #1:  If you are not certain whether this article is relevant to your topic or not, you might want to try to find the overview of the study typically found at the end of the introduction and the overview of the results typically found at the beginning of the discussion.

 

Possible Goal #2:  When you are unfamiliar with the research area and need background information (as will be the case throughout most of this class) read the introduction carefully, then read the methods section, then skim the results section, and finally read the discussion carefully.  If there are multiple studies, do this for each, but then pay special attention to the “General Discussion” section.  Don’t worry about fully grasping the results sections. Focus for now on the words in the results section – try to get the gist of what they did and found.  By the end of this class results sections will be much easier for you to read as you will have written your own.

 

Possible Goal #3:  When you are reading a bunch of articles about the same topic and/or when you are already familiar with the background information, your primary goal in reading an empirical article is often to simply learn what the results of the study were. In this case, a good strategy is to read the abstract, skim the introduction (to determine the author’s goal and perspective) and then carefully read the methods and discussion sections (main findings are typically summarized in the discussion section).  After getting the basic idea of the findings, you can then go back to the results section in order to see the actual results, not just the researcher’s interpretation of the results.  You may then re-read certain parts of the paper as you develop specific questions about how this research fits in with your research. Ideas for future research are often buried in the discussion section (great if you are looking for ideas for yourself).