Reading a Journal Article Critically
You can adapt the process described above for reading a book to reading a journal article.
In what follows, however, let's look at how to read a particular type of journal article, namely a typical research article. This kind of article, found in both the natural sciences and the social sciences (but with applications to the other areas of study as well), usually consists of the following parts:
- Abstract
- Introduction
- Method
- Results
- Discussion
This material comes from a handout furnished by Research Triangle reading specialist Ed Neal (a different Ed from UCLA Ed). It was originally used in a psychology course at UNC-Chapel Hill.
(1) Read the abstract first. Make what sense of it you can. It will give you an overview of the topic, the subjects who participated, and the conclusions. Do not be surprised if not all if it is understandable before you have read the article. Because it is meant to summarize, not just provide an introduction, it often includes terms and concepts that are developed within the article.
(2) Read the introduction next. In this section the authors will first introduce you to the topic and give an overview of the unanswered questions that the authors feel are important. In addition you should learn the following: the specific hypotheses of the study, the predictions made by the investigators before doing the experiment, and an overview of the way in which the experimenters went about testing their hypotheses. This is very important. If you miss this, the rest of the article will probably not make much sense.
Note that at the beginning of the introduction, the authors often summarize very concisely what others have done in the same area. Often there are more citations than actual text. There may be very few details at the very beginning, so that all you may understand is the main idea. That's good enough. Do not be discouraged if you don't know what every phrase means. Unless you are knowledgeable of the particular area of psychology summarized, you may not understand everything. So, simply abstract the main ideas and the purpose and basic method used by the authors.
(3) Read the method. This consists of several parts. Your goal here is to find out what was done, how it was done, and to whom (or what) it was done.
--Subjects. This part describes the participants. Often there is more information than you need. The reason is that in order for the results to be compared with the results of other investigators, one needs to know exactly who was included and excluded in the study. For instance, if different researchers get different results, one would want to see if there were differences in the subjects. Try to pick out what is important, and don't pay too much attention to the rest (e.g., how the subjects were recruited is not usually of interest, though it certainly could make a difference).
--Stimuli, materials, apparatus, procedure. The most important goal in reading this section is to find out what was done and how. This section gives you this information, often in excruciating detail. One reason for all the detail is to enable the readers to try to replicate the experiment if they want. Another reason is so that the reader can picture exactly what was done. The details of the computers, counterbalancing schemes, etc., are probably not relevant. With experience you will get used to reading through this section, and abstracting just what you need and no more. This does take some practice. You know you are on the right track if you would be able to describe in a few sentences what the subjects did and how, if you can say what the dependent and independent variables were and how they were measured
(4) Read the results. This section describes the data and the statistical analyses. Here you usually have the means and standard deviations of each of the dependent variables. Look closely at these. You also have the results of the statistical tests of the hypotheses. You can ignore the statistics if you don't understand them., because each test should be explained in plain English as well. In other words, look at this section to see whether the data fit the hypotheses, and whether the predicted differences were statistically significant (usually p<.05). Often there will be a very brief summary at the end of the results section, or the end of each subsections within the results section. Keep an eye out for this.
(5) Read the discussion. Here the authors have several goals. The first is to summarize the results, without numbers, without statistics. It should be very clear now whether the predictions were confirmed or not. That's the first goal.
Another goal is to discuss any potential problems with the experiment, and to consider whether the conclusions should be interpreted with caution. No study is ever perfect, and hindsight is always 20-20, so there may be some qualifiers (e.g., limits to one's ability to generalize to other subjects or to other ways of measuring the concepts).
A third goal is to discuss the implications of the results for the authors' theory. The authors may discuss here whether the theory needs to be revised, based on the data, or whether it was confirmed. They may also consider alternative explanations for their results, if relevant. The end of the discussion usually is a statement of the potential impact of the results on the field, and a consideration of future directions for the research.
(6) Re-read the abstract when you have finished the article. Make sure it makes sense now. If not, ask yourself where the problem lies. Do you understand what the subjects did and why (introduction, method)? Do you understand the findings (results, discussion)? Do you understand the theory or ideas that are relevant to the article?
(7) The ultimate test of comprehension: Could you explain the entire article to someone else in your own words?