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11 - Reading Journal Articles

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 September 2019

Joanna M. Setchell
Joanna M. Setchell
Affiliation:
Durham University
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Summary

Critical reading is an essential skill for scientists. As you read the rest of this book, you’ll come back to the literature again and again, to find out more about particular topics. Reading takes time and can be daunting, but it gets easier with experience. Reading also teaches you what goes where in a paper. The more you read, the better you will write. In this chapter I explain how to read articles, beginning with general advice, then providing questions to ask as you read each section of an article. Then I cover organising a reference collection and synthesising what you read.

Keywords

readingliterature review
Type
Chapter
Information
Studying Primates
How to Design, Conduct and Report Primatological Research
 , pp. 147 - 156
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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References

11.10 Further Reading

Gurevitch, J, Koricheva, J, Nakagawa, S, Stewart, G. 2018. Meta-analysis and the science of research synthesis. Nature 175: 175–182. A review of the benefits of meta-analysis in synthesising research.Google Scholar
Pain, E. 2016. How to (seriously) read a scientific paper. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.caredit.a1600047 [Accessed 3 January 2019]. Science Careers blog. A collection of advice from scientists at different career stages.Google Scholar
Sayer, EJ. 2018. The anatomy of an excellent review paper. Functional Ecology 32: 2278–2281. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2435.13207x. A very useful editorial on how to synthesise the literature, rather than simply summarising it.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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