How To Read A Paper Quickly & Effectively | Easy Research Reading Technique

hey everyone and welcome back to my channel so this video is kindly sponsored by skillshare an online learning community for creatives i'll be telling you a bit more about their inspiring classes at the end of this video a topic that i get asked quite a bit and it's about reading research papers and sort of whether you need to read from the start to the end in every single detail and the answer to that is absolutely not and today i'm going to go through exactly how you want to read a research paper um in about i

mean 15 to 20 minutes depending on how much detail you want to go into um so i've been reading on notability it's a great app where you are able to import a pdf highlight scribble write on it without having to actually print anything out so it's a great resource and i'd highly recommend you to download and take a look as you can see just unwrapped the pen um and there's some asmr for you right there by reading research papers like this you're enabling yourself to have sort of a disciplined approach and prevents you from drowning

in the details before you even get a bird's-eye view every paper does not need to be read in the depth that it presents itself in so it's important to be able to quickly skim through the important details before you decide to dive in and read the whole paper so starting off you want to look at the title of the paper as this is probably the best um biggest selling point and the most important few words where you might have some keywords that are included and give you an idea of sort of the topic that's about

to um be discussed you can see here i'm putting out um the method and i'm also pulling out the sort of what the result is and you then want to move on and look at the abstract now the abstract is usually written in a few kind of sections and it's quite consistently written like this so you can just pull out these bits of information the first is the background sort of the why why is it that this paper is um written what it what is the gap in literature and the gap in research that it

is trying to fill you then want to look at the methods um just quickly is it an animal study is it a human study and then you want to look at the results quickly and the discussion or the conclusion so there's sort of a couple parts that you you almost always have in the abstract and you can very quickly just pick them out and again at this point you can decide well actually this isn't something i'm interested in or it is something that you're interested in and you can keep on reading from there you then

want to take a look at the first and the last paragraph of the introduction again this just gives you a bit of a background and helps you understand what the hypothesis is and helps you understand what the research aims are of this particular paper and the first paragraph because that usually gives you the sort of general background and the last paragraph because typically the last paragraph tells you um their sort of intention and kind of summarizes what's to come and again it allows you to sort of understand why the paper's being written what their research

aims are and their hypothesis is and sort of a summary of their methods as well to come it's quite nice it's definitely their last paragraph is something that i always look at even if i don't always look at the um the first paragraph you then want to move on and take a look at the subsection headings of the results now this might seem a bit random because the methods come next but the methods aren't really important unless you're looking to copy the paper and and do the study in a slightly different way the methods are

not really that important so i'll jump straight to the results and i look at the titles of the subsections and typically the titles are um a quick snippet of the result that's to come so usually what papers will do when they're when when they're writing up their results is give you a quick sort of summary in the title in the subtitles you don't want to move on and look at the conclusion now it might seem like you've jumped quite far ahead but really at this point you understand what the results are you know what the

paper is trying to achieve and what their research aims are so you can just jump to the conclusion to get a quick summary and as you can see it's a very short summary of what this paper found and to be honest you don't really need to look beyond this point especially if you're not looking at the paper in too much depth at this point you'll understand what they've done how their paper fits into the literature and how their paper fits into the research space and their final kind of their unique results and that's all you

really need to know at this point but if you do want to go into more depth you can look at the results and kind of look at the graphs or the tables or the figures or whatever it is that you've got in front of you add a bit more depth and pick out some significant um results and this could be in the in the form of a graph as you can see here there's a particular um very significant result and you can just kind of take a look at that pointing out and just remind yourself

to take a look at it in more detail maybe later on and again this kind of gives you an overview of what this paper is showing in a bit more depth and can allow you to interpret that interpret that for your own research you then want to look at the limitations now this paper is quite nice because it has got its own little section for limitations allow you to sort of understand what the flaws were or what some barriers and challenges were that were faced by that particular study and lastly and but definitely not least

i always try to highlight a couple of other references that may be cited in this particular paper that i think are interesting and that could be useful for my own study now there could be there might be a paper where they referenced and they said that this study has shown x y and z and we're basing our study on this and i might i might find that really interesting i might want to look at that myself tend to highlight those papers and try to take a look at it at a later date and that's it

you're pretty much done now that wasn't very very long at all so starting off always look at the title pull out your keywords then look at your abstract identify um sort of the results and the methods then you want to read the first and the last paragraph of your introduction or the literature review you then want to take a look at the results and just quickly skim through the titles together to kind of gauge what what the research is that they've actually found and what the results are and sort of the key results if you

like um you then want to read the conclusion very quickly just to summarize uh and get a summary of what the paper actually found um and then if you want to go into more detail look at the results and try to identify and pull out some key results that you think could be applicable and could be interesting for you and your study and then like i said in this case we have got some limitations here so that could be something to look at as well just to for contextualizing the study and understanding what the challenges

were and the last but not least pull out a few references that you can take on and keep on reading and to understand a bit more about the context and about a bit more about this particular research field and what else there is out there now what i've described is sort of a first pass where you're just understanding the theoretical basis you're understanding kind of what kind of paper this is and what contribution this particular study has um contributed to their research field and if you do want to go into more depth then of course

you do have to look into more depth as to the methods and sort of the exact results maybe the stats and the figures but really for most papers i would say for sort of 75 of papers that you read this would suffice you've actually taken out quite a lot of information already just from doing a quick overview as i have done so as i mentioned earlier skillshare is sponsoring this video so thank you so much skillshare as always um it's an online learning community for creatives where millions come together to take the next step in

the creative journey and skillshare is essentially for lifelong learners like as you guys know i am a huge advocate of learning and i really love skillshare because it includes a combination of video lessons and also projects and skillshare also has classes that can fit any schedule on any skill level so you don't have to be an expert so you're able to come into skillshare a platform that has no ads and it's created specifically for learning and they're always launching loads of premium classes so you can always stay focused and kind of go wherever your creativity

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learning too so don't forget to subscribe to my channel to see more from me i hope that this video was helpful and leave me your comments down below as to how you read papers do you also um do a similar technique as me or are you someone who likes to read every word to word don't do that and i'll see you guys in my next one okay bye