Strategies for Reading Academic Research
This week we pivot from writing articles on medium.com to planning and researching the academic research paper. I’ve already suggested some promising research to most of you. Now comes the challenging part–reading and digesting that material.
There’s a lot of jokes out there about the nature of academic research–why is it so difficult? Is this even English? Etc. Some of these chides are well-earned. But the thing to remember here is that academic vocabularies and styles develop over long periods of time. The more people study a particular problem, the more precise and deep meanings become.
Whatever your field, you will encounter these precise vocabularies. At first encounter, the prose can be daunting and appear almost impenetrable. My focus these next few weeks is to help acclimate you to academic discourse, to help you wade in to the kind of material that you will encounter over the next few years. Learning to read complex research in a short amount of time is a hard skill, but it is important to learn how to read it strategically. Likewise, it can be quite difficult to condense a 20-page article into a few paragraphs, and certainly the I have collected a few readings that should help us do this.
- Paul Gillin’s “How to Read and Summarize a 20-Page Research Report in 20 Minutes”
- Wikihow’s “How to Summarize a Journal Article”
- UBCiSchool’s “How to Read an Academic Article” video
From these, we can synthesize a few general rules:
- Pass One–see the framework–Begin by reading the abstract, introduction, and conclusion. Look at any tables, diagrams, and/or illustrations. Have an overall sense of the argument.
- In or near the conclusion, look for where the writer(s) advocate(s) for us to do something differently; what does she perceive as the impact of this research?
- Can you summarize the paper in a sentence or two in your own words?
- Pass Two–
- Highlight and annotate as you go. Look for keywords that indicate findings. Try to identify what problem the article hopes to address
- Especially when working with research, make note of the methodology. Was it a survey? An experiment? Was it qualitative research (textual analysis), or more quantitative (measurement)? When working with scholarship, pay attention to the theorists or scholars the author uses to support her argument.
- Pass Three–Can I answer all of the following questions?:
- What are the central arguments in the article?
- How did they collect their evidence?
- What does their evidence say?
- Why is the article important?
- What recommendations do the authors make?
- After reading this research, what recommendations can I make?
- How does the article contribute to my field of study, my present research?
