Reading Scholarly Articles
A crucial part of scholarly research is finding out what we already know so we can make hypotheses that are informed by existing knowledge.
This means we need to start by seeing what been done already to study your topic. At this point in your project, you need to gather the most current knowledge so you can ask an informed question and develop a falsifiable hypothesis. That knowledge is found in the articles published by current researchers looking into similar problems or questions.
People will sometimes call these "literature", "research", or "scholarship", but they are generally referring to the same thing - an article published in an academic journal, written by an expert in that field, describing research or analysis they have conducted.
There are two big things to keep in mind when reading these kinds of articles:
- They are written for other scholars in their field - the authors assume readers are already familiar with the background concepts and will reference things without necessarily stopping to explain them
- An article only adds one piece to our larger understanding - research papers aren't the best place to find background information; they tend to report how one specific study or experiment contributes new understanding to the question or topic
- Some papers will overview topics broadly, but they can't cover every aspect of a topic - you will still need to find other resources to fill in the rest of the picture
Parts of a Scholarly Paper
One thing that helps when reading academic papers is becoming familiar with the standard structure they use to lay out what they did and what they found.
- Introduction: provides context for the study and summarizes the existing research on the topic
- Ask yourself: Why did the authors do this study? What do we already know about the topic? What's the hypothesis?
- Methods: explains exactly what the researchers did during the experiment
- Ask yourself: How do the methods help answer the research question? Why these controls and sampling techniques?
- Results: summarizes the major findings with the help of figures, tables, and statistical analysis
- Ask yourself: What story do the figures and tables tell? How do the authors summarize their findings?
- Discussion: interprets the results and makes a case for why they matter
- Ask yourself: What is this study's major contribution? What research still needs to be done?
These categories may or may not be called the same thing - sometimes in Economics, you will see sections called Literature Review (summarizing what was known before the study), Data (a description of where they got the data they used), Analysis, or other titles. Don't get intimidated - when reading an article, every section you read is probably filling one of the purposes listed above.
Strategy
You don't have to read scholarly papers in order.
In fact, few people do! You do have to read the article if you intend to use it as a source for your paper, but for your first reading in particular, feel free to jump around in your reading order. This makes it easier to get the big picture at the start (i.e., what this research found and why it's important) so you have it in mind when you get into the more complex details of the methods and results sections.
While reading articles on your topic, try using a strategy like this one:
- Skim the introduction and get an idea of what we already know about the topic
- Flip to the results and just look at the data tables and figures to start
- Read the discussion all the way through to get the authors' interpretation of the results
- Go to the methods and see if you can summarize (in one or two sentences) what the authors did and why
- Go back to the results and make sure the authors' descriptions of their findings actually support the conclusions you read in the discussion section
This is a solid way to orient yourself for your first reading of an academic article. When you revisit the article later and read it through again, it'll be easier to make sense of things because you already know what this research was trying to do and what it found.
Articles to Compare
INSTRUCTIONS: Click each image below to login and look at each article more closely. Take note of some of the differences between these articles. When would each of these sources be helpful? Where would you find each of these sources?
(NOTE: Login using your Emory NetID and password e.g. jpsmith)
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