The vast majority of the scientific articles follow a structure that is known as IMRaD. That stand for Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion. 

In addition a scientific article is “wrapped” by an abstract and a conclusion. 

Let’s see these parts one by one:

• Abstract: Summarize the all article in 5-10 lines giving anticipation of the findings
• Introduction: A clarification about the context of the paper and a summary of existing research relevant to the topic of interest.
• Method: explains the set of techniques that the authors used for arriving at the findings in the paper
• Results: the main course of the article and explain what the authors found following the method previously suggested.
• Discussion: evaluate method and results from a bird eye view and try to generalize the findings addressing questions like: How much can I generalize findings? How these findings compare with results of other scientist? What are the practical implication?
• Conclusion: summarize the entire paper with emphasis on what are the findings, the “take home” message and possible future actions.

Not all the scientific papers are exactly structured in this way but, content wise, they contain the mentioned information. Example of variation includes:

• Dividing the introduction in 2 part: introduction and related work
• Move the related work part just before the conclusion
• Method and results are part of the same section.
• Results and discussion are part of the same section.
• Discussion and conclusions are part of the same section.

Nevertheless, the structure is quite similar and you should take advantage of this if you want to read scientific papers quickly and effectively.

What follows is a step by step filtering process that take advantage of the fact that scientific papers follow the IMRaD structure. If properly applied it can be used to speed up the way you read scientific papers.

Step 0: start by asking yourself the following question:

“Why am I reading this paper?” 

This is the number one thing for understanding how to read scientific papers quickly and effectively. I can’t stress this enough, if you want to read scientific papers quickly and effectively you my have a clear goal in mind. Possible answer includes:

• Trying to build an extensive literature review
• Looking for ideas around a particular topic
• Looking for a methodology for testing a possible idea

You will direct your attention to the section(s) that better address what you are looking for by following this step by step process.

Step 1: Read Title, Keywords and Abstract:

Is the subject of your interest? Can you devise the research question that the authors are trying to answer? If you have a yes to both the questions, you may want to consider moving forward. If you can’t understand the research question by reading the abstract it may not be a good paper to ready anyway. More information in this article on how to assess the quality of a paper.

how to read #ScientificResearch like #researchers : in a quick and effective way. #papers #paper #research
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Step 2: Grasp the Conceptual Framework and the Findings

Probably the conclusion contains this information. However, if you need more details, you may want to dig into the method and the results part of the paper. Ask yourself: “if I will read this paper will I advance my initial goal? Why?”. If the answer is positive you can move to the next step otherwise you can start analyzing the next candidate.

Step 3: Evaluate the type and quality of the research

Not all papers are equal. If you will dig further in the method and the results you should be able to form an opinion about the validity of their methods and the deepness of the approach. At the end of this phase you should be able to have: (i) a clear understanding of what this paper is about and (ii) an opinion regarding the quality of the work.

If your goal is building a literature review you do not need to read an understand the rest of the paper. That is the same in the case you are shopping for ideas. You already have a clear idea of what is the paper about and you will reading it in a deeper way when you will need. At the same time if the paper does not meet your quality criteria you can discard it.

Step 4: Keep Track of the Paper and What You Have Done

If you reach this step is because the paper is “good” and you believe is interesting for addressing your goals. Consequently, you may want to save the article in your repository. You want to print it for a full read as well. At the same time you want to write down 2-3 lines regarding what is the paper about and how benefit you. This may save you when you are suppose to read a lot of papers at the same time, as you will be able to track what each author is proposing minimizing the confusion.

Step 5: Read the Full Paper and Understand the Details

If this particular article checked all the box, is of your interest, help you achieve your goal and is of good quality. All the gatekeepers of the previous 4 steps are saying “is a go”. So, read it carefully and put attention at the details; maybe you can use their methodology for proving something that you are working on, maybe has an interesting idea that can be used in your domain of research. Please remember that “the devil is in the details”, so is time to do the some final checks and use it as needed.

This step by step method is how to read scientific papers quickly and effectively. The secret is that each step acts as a filter and will tell you if you should keep reading or is it time to move to a different article. This will save you time and will help you to keep track of what you are doing so that you will not get lost when the number of papers that you have to read increases.

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Mentor: Francesco Lelli

This thesis is about trying to answering the following questions: “what is a good research paper?” or “is this publication worth reading?” before reading the paper.

Nowadays the amount of scientific journals is overwhelming and constantly increasing. Students, as well as senior scientists, are facing an impossible amount of information to elaborate. Consequently, they are force to apply a set of heuristics for selecting the information to process and consume. This approach force the scholar in forming an opinion prior a proper read of the scientific article. This is “by definition” a bias that may be misleading.

You will investigate how scholars implement in an explicit or implicit manner these heuristics.  You will also devise best practices and computer driven tools that could help improve the efficiency of the selection process of scientific articles.

 If you are curious and you what to know more about the topic, I recommend you the following:

• Read this article about my personal heuristics for understanding if a paper is worth reading.
• A generic article in Wikipedia about Heuristics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heuristics_in_judgment_and_decision-making
• A few keywords that you may want to use in google scholar: Heuristics and Bias, Heuristics in decision making, Heuristics in information management, Heuristics in software engineering.

This project does not involve an internship. Instead, it will try to have a high academic relevance and theoretical contribution and, based on the quality of your work the candidate may be able to publish the results in the proceedings and scientific journals.

You may propose a qualitative or quantitative approach for validating the claims that you will be making in your thesis.

The ideal candidate is a self started go-getter student that like to see things thru and do not limit himself to take facts for granted.

If this topic trigger your intellectual curiosity, just get in touch with me

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If that is the alternative some heuristics may guide you in forming an opinion prior reading a scientific paper. This opinion is “by definition” a bias and you should be aware that may be misleading. In other words, you will answer to the question “what is a good research paper?” or “is this publication worth reading?” before reading the paper.

First of all, there is not a magic answer to these questions. A most heuristics for assessing the quality of a publication will have flaws.

A good publication is a publication that adds value to what you are trying to achieve. There is no escape, you first have to read the article and then judge it on your own. Both Einstein and Shakespeare they had a moment in their life when they publish something and they had zero citation and zero positive review.

Nevertheless, let’s consider the following heuristics:

• (i) Is the abstract scientifically sound? Is it formulating an hypothesis? Is it summarizing the performed experiment(s) for validating the hypothesis?  If the answer is no. Well you may be suspicious.
• (ii) Does the article has citations?Obviously, the newer it is the less citations is going to have. However, a lot of citations just imply that the article has been mentioned by colleagues and nothing about the reason why.
• (iii) How citations are distributed over the time? A lot of citations right after the article was published and nothing over the years may indicate that finding are no longer of interest of the research community. Alternatively, the ideas may have been replaced by a “a better one”.
• (iv) Do Authors keep citing their previous works? If that is the case the article may be just a small increment of an existing idea already published and you may want to go directly to “its origin”.
• (v) Is the author known among the research community? You should always think with your own head, however some people are known for been very productive researchers and this may serve you as a shortcut.
• (vi) is the journal/conference considered a good venue? Short answer: in this respect, probably your department (or University or Research Institute) maintains a list of Journal that are considered of “good quality”. These are a list of venue that your “local scientific community” consider respectable. Obviously this list is not exhaustive but can be a starting point.

6 Heuristics for Assessing the Quality of a Publication
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These are 6 heuristics for assessing the quality of a publication. However, a long answer to the point (vi) requires some understanding on how scientific venues (such as journals and conferences) work and I will make a dedicated article on the topic.

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