A brief overview of the basic anatomy of a research paper

2. 1. What do I need?
Old School
• Printed copy of paper
• Pencil, pen
• Highlighter
New Kid
• Tablet device/computer
with PDF software
capable of allowing
annotations
• PDF copy of paper

3. What do I need?
• Patience
• Healthy dose of skepticism

4. 2. Read the paper
• Critical thinking process
• Don’t assume the authors are always correct.
• Be skeptical – apply the rigours of the
scientific model to all research

5. Some questions to ask
• If the authors attempt to solve a problem, are
they solving the right problem?
• What are the limitations of the solution (including
limitations the authors might not have noticed or
admitted)?
• Are there other solutions the authors do not
seem to have considered?
• What are the good ideas in this paper?

6. Some more questions
• Are the assumptions the authors make
reasonable?
• Is the logic of the paper clear and justifiable,
given the assumptions, or is there a flaw in the
reasoning?
• If the authors present data, did they gather the
right data to substantiate their argument?
• Did they gather and interpret the data in the
correct manner?

7. Even more questions
• Would other data or other means of collection of
data be more compelling?
• Can the results or ideas be generalised to wider
populations?
• Are there improvements that might make
important differences?
• If you were going to start doing research from
this paper, what would be the next thing you
would do?

8. While reading
• Make notes
• Go through the references in the paper
• Highlight the key points
• Highlight key data
• Highlight anything questionable

9. Some papers may
require a number of
readings

10. 3. The Anatomy of a Paper

11. Authors & Affiliations

12. Abstract

13. Introduction

14. Introduction
• Authors put their research into context
• Make a case for what they’re doing, why
they’re doing it and why it’s important
• A brief overview of prior related research
• Identify gaps in knowledge that they hope to
fill

15. Methods

16. Methods
• Explain exactly how they carried out their
research
• Detailed, step-by-step explanation of all of the
methods
• Theoretically replicate the research and
achieve the same results

17. Results

18. Results
• Summarises the main findings of the study
• Present the results, not discuss them
• Graphs, tables, etc. are often used to present
and summarise data

19. Discussion

20. Discussion
• Implications of results
• Do the results support the authors’ original
hypotheses?
• Different ways to interpret the results?
• Future research?
• Limitations!

21. References

22. References
• Sometimes the most useful part of a paper!
• Almost always something listed in the
references that you didn’t find yourself (or
didn’t even think to look for)

23. 4. Compare
Compare it to
similar papers

24. 5. Archive
• File/folder
• Endnote
• Mendeley
• Papers
• Zotero
• Read by QxMD