How I Analyze Articles

Welcome to another blog post! This post will be about how I read research articles.

1. Read the article title. Why did they write the article, who do you think paid them, what do you think they are trying to prove?
2. Read the names of the authors, the date the article was published, where the authors work, etc. Is the source reliable?
3. Is the article readable or scientific mumbojumbo? There are so many articles, don’t waste time reading what makes no sense.
4. What is the hypothesis, what answer are they looking for?
5. Look at the figures. How would you have done the experiment differently? What could they have added? Could they have made their graphs easier to read?
6. What did they use to gather their data? Is it clean and reliable? Can you see it? How could they have analyzed it?
7. Compare to scenarios in the book statistics done wrong, what obvious mistakes have they made if any?
8. Read the introduction, highlight what you like.
9. Write questions as you read through the discussion.
10. Scan through the references, see if it made any sense to use them.
11. Do you think the researchers are correct?
12. What are the doubts the author has?

Thanks for reading!