Reading scientific literature

You all know that reading scientific texts, be it introductory text books or scientific research articles, is a different experience than reading e.g. a novel or a magazine. It feels different and is usually more difficult. That often comes from the content, which in itself can be complicated and difficult to understand. It can also come from conventions in writing about research findings which sometimes make those publications boring and tedious to read. If you are new to the topic, reading a research article will make you feel lost because you don’t know the work and authors it references and you have difficulties to understand what it is good for in the first place. But there are ways to deal with it, but back to reading. We read scientific material for a particular purpose, usually not for recreation but for understanding something better, and for our education or job qualification. This kind of reading resembles work rather than leisure. So, this literature is written differently, and we read for different purposes than we read our usual stuff. But how is it written and how should we read it for not getting all stressed out about probably not getting important parts and doing bad in our studies?

Knowing something about the craft of writing up research is of course handy for preparing your own reports and theses. It also gives you more insight in understanding structure and format of a text which makes it more accessible to you while reading. There are extensive guidelines for writing scientific literature for example here and in very good books like this one. The first and probably most important difference in writing a scientific text compared to a novel or other stuff, is that you don’t want to create suspension, not purposefully or by accident. You don’t want to surprise your reader with your finding in the end like in a crime story but you want to throw the important parts and findings at him or her as soon as possible. In articles there is an abstract which explains in the first sentence or two, why the research is important for what reasons. Then, which questions are answered. How the questions are answered and what the answers and conclusions are. No one would read a crime story with an abstract like that. In scientific reading, this helps us a lot to decide whether the article actually is for us or not and even more to understand its content. Well written texts present important key messages at the beginning of a chapter and at the first sentence of a paragraph. The first sentence of a paragraph is usually called topic sentence, and gives away a finding or claim, which the rest of the paragraph then explains with more detail and by weighing some arguments in its favour and against it. Here is the first link to reading strategies. You can skim well written texts. Skimming is just reading the first sentence of each paragraph for getting a rough overview of where the article’s argument is taking you.