More about the best way to read scholarly articles

The student may have decided that the abstract is interesting and informative enough to make them want to look at the whole article. They may ask what to do next. Our reply could be:

Some readers never look at introductions for books, because they think they just include lots of thanks to colleagues and friends and other information that is not useful for the reader. However, in serious academic research and theses, introductions can be very useful, since they may inform us why the researcher bothered to do the work.

A useful introduction will explain why it was necessary or interesting to carry out research on the given topic. It will briefly offer some explanation of current understanding or knowledge of a subject, and also what is not known or understood. After reading a well-written introduction, we should better understand what how advanced researchers are about a certain matter, and how far they still have to go before completely grasping it. The student should note that while it is not acceptable to cite the past literature in an abstract, it is helpful to do so in an introduction. The student may ask:

Why is it not possible to cite past literature in an abstract?

Our reply may be:

Since abstracts are meant to be as short as possible, and every word counts, we do not mention other research, since the subject of the abstract should be the new research being presented, not past work.

An abstract should always tell us what is new. What the academic research paper or thesis being read contributes to the field, and not what other past researchers have done. This makes it all the more important to refer to the literature in the introduction to an academic research paper or thesis. As readers, we may recognize the references to other publications if we have done some reading in the field. These citations will reassure us that the thesis or academic research paper that we are reading is of direct interest to us, and relates to our own field of research. If as readers of an introduction we do not recognize any of the authors being mentioned by the writer, then we may wonder if we are really reading something about our own field of research. An informative and useful introduction will also tell us as readers what the goal or point of any research was meant to be. The introduction should answer the question, why bother? After reading it, we should be confident in knowing why the researcher felt it was worth the time to carry out an investigation. This should reassure us that we will not be wasting our time if we read it. The student may ask us:

Why should I bother to read the materials and methods section of a thesis or academic research paper?

We may reply:

The materials and methods section lets us compare what we may be planning to do in our own research, to what the writer has done. Possibly the writer has other resources that we do not have, or the basic details are different in other ways than what is available to us. From these difference, we should be able to tell whether the past research can be usefully compared with what we intend to do.

How was the research done? Were many samples included, or only a few? Was data gathered by online questionnaire or in-depth interview, or both? How were samples chosen for the study? The answers to these questions may give us some ideas about how to design our own research project. Note that as readers of the academic research paper, we may not be reading the paper word by word from beginning to end. We may jump around between sections to get the information that is the most directly useful to us as readers.

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