Hello, it’s #optomstudies here with a post about how to quickly get the information you need out of a scientific journal article for the average university student! This is not a guide to critically analysing journal articles.
Important N.B. These are pointers on how to extract the information for your studies. Critically analysing a paper to see what are the limitations and benefits of a study, what problems there are with the methodology, whether this would affect the quality or even the validity of results, etc. is a whole nother skill which at times requires background knowledge; this approach won’t necessarily work if the authors of the paper are doing shady editing. Which is why it’s very important to critically analyse papers too!
The first thing that you should read is the abstract. The abstract gives you a preview of the type of paper you’re looking at, and/or the important conclusions that came out of it. It will guide how you read the rest of the paper.
There are three categories of science articles which I see as comprising the entirety of what students will encounter:
Primary research articles, which can be retrospective, prospective, cohort-studies, randomised controlled trials, etc. These will have extremely specific topics, and will usually also discuss a few other relevant research papers in the same/similar area as the paper itself.
Review papers, which summarise a collection of original research articles in order to give a discourse about a particular topic e.g. pathophysiology, epidemiology, management, etc.
Definitions, which are seminal papers made after experts on the topic convene, which define what specific disease entities and their staging and categorisation are. These will only briefly mention other articles, and mainly focus on how the committee came to the definitions created.
Getting the Most Out of Every Type of Journal Article
From the abstract you will have gathered what type of article it is. Here is what you should read to get around 80-90% of what you need to know from each:
Primary research papers: read just the abstract; most studies will have the information summarised there, which is great because even if post-graduation you need to read some papers, you’re able to get the majority of info from just the abstract. If you read the results section as well, you should have 95% of the info you need. Though reading the intro and discussion will help give you context and greatly enhance understanding, it’s a lot of text for that last 5%. Methodology you won’t need to read unless you’re critically analysing a paper.
Review papers: Unfortunately there’s not really a shortcut, because review papers themselves are essentially shortcuts to traversing the original research papers. However, there are a few papers which do have an appendix at the end which usually summarises the results of important papers. Tables in between are usually listing articles alongside the technical findings, so you don’t really need to read those.
Definitions: read the tables only. For these papers, reading the text in between doesn’t really help because it’s more about the processes of the committee. If there are multiple tables, you’d want to find the most clinically applicable information too.
Other Useful Sections to Read/Consider
Authors/Journal Published: these give you an idea of the ‘legitimacy’ and ‘quality’ of the paper, but the reason why I’m not putting this first is because 1. any articles given to you to read by your lecturer are most likely going to be the seminal papers in a particular field of research, and 2. the journal/author can still come out with absolute rubbish even if their previous papers have been fine, case in point The Lancet and the retracted article about vaccines.
Introduction: helpful if you’re completely lost about the topic. This gives you an overview about what they’re studying, why it’s important, and what their research (supposedly) adds to the scientific knowledge base.
Hopefully this guide is helpful as a way to quickly get the information you need out of a journal article for your studies!
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