Reading Research Papers
Reading last week’s papers and even starting this week’s papers, I realized that as a biology major, I would have a bit of a problem understanding these geology based research articles. I did my best to understand the basic theories and hoped that I would understand more after we discussed it in class. In class Professor Hauck discussed ways to help us read research articles in areas that we are not familiar with, or that are hard to understand. He suggested that we start with the abstract and really understanding the figures. The abstract gives us a synopsis as to what the researcher is looking for or studying, how the experiment was conducted and the a brief description of the results. Although short the abstract is a good way to get a full grasp on the paper.
This got me thinking about other ways that can help in understanding what a research paper actually means. I found both this week and last week, that reading and truly understanding the introduction was really helpful. If you can get a firm grasp of the definitions, and background information that is less complicated then the methods, you can kind of get an idea about why they studied a particular thing and what they found. It seems to me that it is more important to understand the introduction, and conclusion rather than the methods. This approach was really helpful for me. I found it more beneficial to focus on the theory and what they wanted to find and what they did find versus the complicated methods they used in conducting research.
It is important to recognize your limitations when reading research articles. If the paper is on a topic or field you are not familiar with you have to realize what it is you want to gain from the paper. Ask yourself why am I reading this paper? You may come to realize that you want to gain a firm grasp of the theory, purpose and conclusion of the paper. Don’t get me wrong it is important to understand how the researcher collected data and conducted research, but at times you must realize that your limited knowledge does not allow for a complete understanding of the methods. I guess my point here is, don’t get all caught up in the fact that you don’t know how to derive a certain equation or that you don’ t really know what a Monte Carlo Simulation is, it is more important to get to why the researcher was interested in the topic, the benefits the findings could have, and the final conclusions discovered.
Oh and having an encyclopedia or internets source nearby is really helpful... :)
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