when reading the results section of a research article you should ask yourself

How to Read a Scholarly Article: Order of Reading

• Layout of a Scholarly Article

Order of Reading

• Reading Strategies

You don't necessarily need to read an article straight through from beginning to end.  This isn't a mystery--you won't spoil anything by skipping straight to the conclusion if you want.  Reading articles in the following systematic manner can help you understand their complexities and arguments.

1. Start with the Title and Abstract  - These will tell you about the article's focus and let you know if it's relevant to your research question.

• Look for keywords that may tell you what the article is about or be useful while conducting additional research.

2. Next, read the Introduction and Conclusion  - These will give you the article's main arguments and its thesis/hypothesis, as well as what the author believes they proved through their study.

• Will this article tell me anything new about the topic?
• What have other people already written about this topic, and what is left to discover? (Literature Review)
• What does this study mean, and why is it important?
• Do you find the author's conclusions to be valid?

3. Jump back to the Methods & Results  - These sections tend to be heavier on details, and you may be able to skim them if they don't focus entirely upon your research question.

• How did the author do their research? Is this a quantitative or qualitative study?
• Could you repeat the author's work or experiment based on the information provided?
• What did the author find, and how did they find it?
• Are the results presented in a factual and unbiased way?

4. Move onto the Discussion  - This is arguably the most important part of the article, because it's here that the author explains what everything means. This is also where reading the Introduction and Conclusion first can pay off, since you already know the author's arguments and what they proved.

• Does the author's analysis agree with the data they provided in the Results section?
• What conclusions can you draw from this data? Do they agree with the author's conclusions?

5. Finish with the Citations/References  - Don't just ignore these--if you need additional sources for your research, you may find them here. The author has made a list of other works on this topic, so make use of it.

• While reading the article, take note of any citations that may seem relevant to your research question, and track them down using this section.
• Also remember to use the Literature Review for ideas on other work about this subject. The author has done some of your work for you by explaining what others have written on the topic, so you can track them down, too.

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Evaluating Information

• Understanding Primary and Secondary Sources
• Exploring and Evaluating Popular, Trade, and Scholarly Sources

Reading a Scholarly Article

Common components of original research articles, while you read, reading strategies, reading for citations, further reading, learning objectives.

This page was created to help you:

Identify the different parts of a scholarly article

Efficiently analyze and evaluate scholarly articles for usefulness

This page will focus on reading scholarly articles — published reports on original research in the social sciences, humanities, and STEM fields. Reading and understanding this type of article can be challenging. This guide will help you develop these skills, which can be learned and improved upon with practice.

We will go over:

There are many different types of articles that may be found in scholarly journals and other academic publications. For more, see:

• Types of Information Sources

Reading a scholarly article isn’t like reading a novel, website, or newspaper article. It’s likely you won’t read and absorb it from beginning to end, all at once.

Instead, think of scholarly reading as inquiry, i.e., asking a series of questions as you do your research or read for class. Your reading should be guided by your class topic or your own research question or thesis.

For example, as you read, you might ask yourself:

• What questions does it help to answer, or what topics does it address?
• Are these relevant or useful to me?
• Does the article offer a helpful framework for understanding my topic or question (theoretical framework)?
• Do the authors use interesting or innovative methods to conduct their research that might be relevant to me?
• Does the article contain references I might consult for further information?

In Practice

Scanning and skimming are essential when reading scholarly articles, especially at the beginning stages of your research or when you have a lot of material in front of you.

Many scholarly articles are organized to help you scan and skim efficiently. The next time you need to read an article, practice scanning the following sections (where available) and skim their contents:

• The abstract: This summary provides a birds’ eye view of the article contents.
• The introduction:  What is the topic(s) of the research article? What is its main idea or question?
• The list of keywords or descriptors
• Methods: How did the author(s) go about answering their question/collecting their data?
• Section headings:  Stop and skim those sections you may find relevant.
• Figures:  Offer lots of information in quick visual format.
• The conclusion:  What are the findings and/or conclusions of this article?

Mark Up Your Text

Read with purpose.

• Scanning and skimming with a pen in hand can help to focus your reading.
• Use color for quick reference. Try highlighters or some sticky notes. Use different colors to represent different topics.
• Write in the margins, putting down thoughts and questions about the content as you read.
• Use digital markup features available in eBook platforms or third-party solutions, like Adobe Reader or Hypothes.is.

Categorize Information

Create your own informal system of organization. It doesn’t have to be complicated — start basic, and be sure it works for you.

• Jot down a few of your own keywords for each article. These keywords may correspond with important topics being addressed in class or in your research paper.  
• Write keywords on print copies or use the built-in note taking features in reference management tools like Zotero and EndNote.  
• Your keywords and system of organization may grow more complex the deeper you get into your reading.

Highlight words, terms, phrases, acronyms, etc. that are unfamiliar to you. You can highlight on the text or make a list in a notetaking program.

• Decide if the term is essential to your understanding of the article or if you can look it up later and keep scanning.

You may scan an article and discover that it isn’t what you thought it was about. Before you close the tab or delete that PDF, consider scanning the article one more time, specifically to look for citations that might be more on-target for your topic.  

You don’t need to look at every citation in the bibliography — you can look to the literature review to identify the core references that relate to your topic. Literature reviews are typically organized by subtopic within a research question or thesis. Find the paragraph or two that are closely aligned with your topic, make note of the author names, then locate those citations in the bibliography or footnote.

See the Find Articles page for what to do next:

• Find Articles

See the Citation Searching page for more on following a citation trail:

• Citation Searching
• Taking notes effectively. [blog post] Raul Pacheco-Vega, PhD
• How to read an academic paper. [video] UBCiSchool. 2013
• How to (seriously) read a scientific paper. (2016, March 21). Science | AAAS.
• How to read a paper. S. Keshav. 2007. SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev. 37, 3 (July 2007), 83–84.

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2.1 Reading an empirical journal article

Learning objectives.

• Identify the key components of empirical journal articles
• Define the basic elements of the results section in a journal article
• Describe statistical significance and confidence intervals

Reading scholarly articles can be more challenging than reading a book, magazine, news article—or even some textbooks. Theoretical and practical articles are, generally speaking, easier to understand. Because empirical articles add new knowledge, they must go through great detail to demonstrate that the information they offer is based on solid science. Empirical articles can be challenging to read, and this section is designed to make that process easier for you.

Nearly all articles will have an abstract , the short paragraph at the beginning of an article that summarizes the author’s research question, methods used to answer the question, and key findings. The abstract may also give you some idea about the theoretical perspective of the author. So, reading the abstract gives you both a framework for understanding the rest of the article and its punch line–what the author(s) found and whether the article is relevant to your area of inquiry. For this reason, it is helpful to skim abstracts as part of the literature search process.

As you will recall from Chapter 1, theoretical articles have no set structure and will look similar to reading a chapter of a book. Empirical articles contain the following sections (although exact section names vary): introduction, methods, results, and discussion. The introduction contains the literature review for the article and is an excellent source of information as you build your own literature review. The methods section reviews how the author gathered their sample, how they measured their variables, and how the data were analyzed. The results section provides an in-depth discussion of the findings of the study. The discussion section reviews the main findings and addresses how those findings fit in with the existing literature. Of course, there will also be a list of references (which you should read!) and there may be a few tables, figures, or appendices at the end of the article as well.

While you should get into the habit of familiarizing yourself with each part of the articles you wish to cite, there are strategic ways to read journal articles that can make them a little easier to digest. Once you have read the abstract for an article and determined it is one you’d like to read in full, read through the introduction and discussion sections next. Because your own review of literature is likely to emphasize findings from previous literature, you should mine the article you’re reading for what’s important to know about your topic. Reading the introduction helps you see the findings and articles the author considers to be significant in the topic area. Reading an article’s discussion section helps you understand what the author views as their study’s major findings and how the author connects those findings to other research.

In your research methods course, you pick up additional research elements that are important to understand. You learn how to identify qualitative and quantitative methods, the criteria for establishing causality, different types of causality, as well as exploratory, explanatory, and descriptive research. This textbook addresses other elements of journal articles, including choices about measurement, sampling, and design. As you learn about these additional items, you will find that the methods and results sections begin to make more sense and you will understand how the authors reached their conclusions.

As you read a research report, there are several questions you can ask yourself about each section, from abstract to conclusion. Those questions are summarized in Table 2.1. Keep in mind that the questions covered here are designed to help you, the reader, to think critically about the research you come across and to get a general understanding of the strengths, weaknesses, and key takeaways from a given study. By considering how you might respond to the following questions while reading research reports, you can gain confidence in describing the report to others and discussing its meaning and impact with them.

Understanding the results section

As mentioned previously in this chapter, reading the abstract that appears in most reports of scholarly research will provide you with an excellent, easily digestible review of a study’s major findings and of the framework the author is using to position their findings. Abstracts typically contain just a few hundred words, so reading them is a nice way to quickly familiarize yourself with a study. If the study seems relevant to your paper, it’s probably worth reading more. If it’s not, then you have only spent a minute or so reading the abstract. Another way to get a snapshot of the article is to scan the headings, tables, and figures throughout the report (Green & Simon, 2012).

One common mistake is reporting the summarized results from the abstract, rather than the detailed findings in the results section of the article. This is a problem when you are writing a literature review because you need to provide specific and clear facts that support your reading of the literature. The abstract may say something like: “we found that poverty is associated with mental health status.” For your literature review, you want the details, not the summary. In the results section of the article, you may find a sentence that states: “for households in poverty, children are three times more likely to have a mental health diagnosis.” This more detailed information provides a stronger basis on which to build a literature review.

Using the summarized results in an abstract is an understandable mistake to make. The results section often contains diagrams and symbols that are challenging to understand. Often, without having completed more advanced coursework on statistical or qualitative analysis, some of the terminology, symbols, or diagrams may be difficult to comprehend. To that end, the purpose of this section is to improve reading comprehension by providing an introduction to the basic components of a results section.

Journal articles often contain tables, and scanning them is a good way to begin reading an article. A table provides a quick, condensed summary of the report’s key findings. The use of tables is not limited to one form or type of data, though they are used most commonly in quantitative research. Tables are a concise way to report large amounts of data. Some tables present descriptive information about a researcher’s sample, which is often the first table in a results section. These tables will likely contain frequencies ( N or n ) and percentages (%). For example, if gender happened to be an important variable for the researcher’s analysis, a descriptive table would show how many and what percent of all study participants are women, men, or other genders. Frequencies or “how many” will probably be listed as N or n , while the percent symbol (%) might be used to indicate percentages.

In a table presenting a causal relationship, two sets of variables are represented. The independent variable, or cause, and the dependent variable, the effect. The independent variable attributes are typically presented in the table’s columns, while dependent variable attributes are presented in rows. This allows the reader to scan across a table’s rows to see how values on the dependent variable attributes change as the independent variable attribute values change. Tables displaying results of quantitative analysis will also likely include some information about the strength and statistical significance of the relationships presented in the table. These details tell the reader how likely it is that the relationships presented will have occurred simply by chance.

Let’s look at a specific example. Table 2.2 is based on data from a study of older workers conducted by Dr. Blackstone, an original author of this textbook. It presents the causal relationship between gender and experiencing harassing behaviors at work. In this example, gender is the independent variable (the cause) and the harassing behaviors listed are the dependent variables (the effects). [1] Therefore, we place gender in the table’s columns and harassing behaviors in the table’s rows.

Reading across the table’s top row, we see that 2.9% of women in the sample reported experiencing subtle or obvious threats to their safety at work, while 4.7% of men in the sample reported the same. We can read across each of the rows of the table in this way. Reading across the bottom row, we see that 9.4% of women in the sample reported experiencing staring or invasion of their personal space at work while just 2.3% of men in the sample reported having the same experience. We’ll discuss p- value later in this section.

These statistics represent what the researchers found in their sample, and they are using their sample to make conclusions about the true population of all employees in the real world. Because the methods we use in social science are never perfect, there is some amount of error in that value. The researchers in this study estimated the true value we would get if we asked every employee in the world the same questions on our survey. Researchers will often provide a confidence interval , or a range of values in which the true value is likely to be, to provide a more accurate description of their data. For example, at the time Matthew DeCarlo wrote this, his wife was expecting their first child. The doctor told them their due date was August 15th. But the doctor also told them that August 15th was only the best estimate. They were actually 95% sure the baby might be born any time between August 1st and September 1st. Confidence intervals are often listed with a percentage, like 90% or 95%, and a range of values, such as between August 1st and Setptember 1st. You can read that as: we are 95% sure your baby will be born between August 1st and September 1st. So, while they got a due date of August 15th, the uncertainty about the exact date is reflected in the confidence interval provided by their doctor.

Of course, we cannot assume that these patterns didn’t simply occur by chance. How confident can we be that the findings presented in the table did not occur by chance? This is where tests of statistical significance come in handy. Statistical significance tells us the likelihood that the relationships we observe could be caused by something other than chance. While statistics classes give you more specific details on tests of statistical significance and reading quantitative tables, the important thing to be aware of as a non-expert reader of tables is that some of the relationships presented will be statistically significant and others may not be. Tables should provide information about the statistical significance of the relationships presented. When reading a researcher’s conclusions, pay attention to which relationships are statistically significant and which are not.

In Table 2.2, you may have noticed that a p value is noted in the very last column of the table. A p- value is a statistical measure of the probability that there is no relationship between the variables under study. Another way of putting this is that the p- value provides guidance on whether or not we should reject the null hypothesis. The null hypothesis is simply the assumption that no relationship exists between the variables in question. In Table 2.2, we see that for the first behavior listed, the p value is 0.623. This means that there is a 62.3% chance that the null hypothesis is correct in this case. In other words, it seems likely that any relationship between observed gender and experiencing threats to safety at work in this sample is simply due to chance.

In the final row of the table, however, we see that the p- value is 0.039. In other words, there is a 3.9% chance that the null hypothesis is correct. Thus, we can be somewhat more confident than in the preceding example that there may be some relationship between a person’s gender and their experiencing the behavior noted in this row. Statistical significance is reported in reference to a value, usually 0.05 in the social science. This means that the probability that the relationship between gender and experiencing staring or invasion of personal space at work is due to random chance is less than 5 in 100. Social science often uses 0.05, but other values are used. Studies using 0.1 are using a more forgiving standard of significance, and therefore, have a higher likelihood of error (10%). Studies using 0.01 are using a more stringent standard of significance, and therefore, have a lower likelihood of error (1%).

Notice being conservative by using words like somewhat and may be . When testing hypotheses, social scientists generally phrase their findings in terms of rejecting the null hypothesis rather than making bold statements about the relationships observed in their tables. You can learn more about creating tables, reading tables, and tests of statistical significance in a class focused exclusively on statistical analysis. For now,this brief introduction to reading tables may improve your confidence in reading and understanding the quantitative tables you encounter while reading reports of social science research.

A final caveat is worth noting here. The previous discussion applies to quantitative articles. Quantitative articles will contain a lot of numbers and the results of statistical tests demonstrating association between those numbers. As a result, they usually have tables and report statistics.  Qualitative articles, on the other hand, will consist mostly of quotations from participants. For most qualitative articles, the authors want to put their results in the words of their participants, as they are the experts. The results section may be organized by theme, with each paragraph or subsection illustrating through quotes how the authors interpret what people in their study said.

Key Takeaways

• Reading a research article requires reading beyond the abstract.
• In tables presenting causal relationships, the independent variable is typically presented in the table’s columns while the dependent variables are presented in the table’s rows.
• When reading a research report, there are several key questions you should ask yourself for each section of the report.
• Abstract- the short paragraph at the beginning of an article that summarizes the its main point
• Confidence interval- a range of values in which the true value is likely to be
• Null hypothesis- the assumption that no relationship exists between the variables in question
• p -value- a statistical measure of the probability that there is no relationship between the variables under study
• Statistical significance- the likelihood that the relationships that are observed could be caused by something other than chance
• Table- a quick, condensed summary of the report’s key findings

Image Attributions

Csaf releases 2009 reading list by master sgt. steven goetsch public domain.

• It wouldn’t make any sense to say that people’s workplace experiences cause their gender, so in this example, the question of which is the independent variable and which are the dependent variables has a pretty obvious answer. ↵

Guidebook for Social Work Literature Reviews and Research Questions Copyright © 2020 by Rebecca Mauldin and Matthew DeCarlo is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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