General Science

There is a common structure with distinct sections for most scientific research articles. The sections are sometimes named slightly differently than described below and/or can be combined together, but all of these components are common across all disciplines:

Research articles are not a novel; you do not have to read them straight through! To make them easier to digest and save time, read them in the following suggested order. When you become more experienced in the field, you may end up developing your own preferred reading order. Rereading parts can also be helpful to build your comprehension.

1. Abstract: a quick summary of the paper and covers the basics

2. Conclusion: typically a short section that restates the findings and can help you quickly decide if the article is still relevant to your topic. If it is not, you can save time and look for other articles.

3. Introduction: helps you understand the purpose and hypothesis of the article

4. Literature Review: provides the background knowledge on the topic. You may wish to refer to References cited here to even further build your understanding of how they arrived to this topic.

5. Discussion: analyzes the results typically in a more accessible language than the parts listed below

6. Methods & Results: you can likely skim the methods first for a quick gist of how it was performed. Then while examining the results, you may need to go back to methods for clarification on how the experiment was done. These tend to be the most technical sections of the paper.

• What is the purpose of this research?
• What is already known on the topic?
• What are the findings?
• How do the findings relate to other research in the field?
• What are the weaknesses in the study?

Having a subject encyclopedia or dictionary handy, or a tab with Google or Wikipedia open to search for terminology you don't recognize will better help you understand what the article is talking about. Remember these articles are primarily written for expert researchers in the field so they do not always have the introductory information that you may need. See the Background Information page on this guide for some suggested resources, or contact a subject librarian for more discipline-specific resources.