Regardless of what field you may be pursuing, literature and article reading are essential skills if you’d like to cite experts, previous studies, or have any sort of deeper understanding of a topic. That being said, articles can get dense and difficult to read if you don’t understand all the jargon, so here’s a step-by-step guide on how to review literature in an efficient and effective manner.

The Abstract

This is the part of the article that is in plain language, so most people can understand. Make sure to read this portion first in order to gain an idea of whether or not the information is worth investing your time into understanding – if it’s not relevant, find another article. There is no point in floating around the wrong article, hoping the right information will come up.

Abstracts should be concise and to the point. If there’s any jargon in the abstract that you don’t understand and isn’t explained, look it up. It will probably be considered background information that’s necessary to build up new understandings.

The Introduction

As its name suggests, the introduction introduces the topic of the article. It mentions its significance and its application to the real world. This part is really important if you are using the literature as background to your own work; take into consideration how different side effects or scraped data could affect aspects of your work here.

Materials and Methods

If you want a really deep understanding of the article, you’ll have to dive into this section with quite a lot of time on your hands, because oftentimes the processes and machinery used by scientific research are complex and dense. To completely understand the research, you’ll have to know how the scientists got to their results.

However, if you’re looking for broad results or just an informal comparison of your results, a broader understanding of the method will be sufficient. While it’s great to understand everything, do not prioritize materials and methods if you are aiming to get breadth and not depth.

Results

The results of an article tell data as it is. It’s often presented as a collection of data, plots, and graphs, but really, it should be assumption-free and only give the information that was collected.

This is where you’d pull the information to make your own conclusions, if you were using the data as part of a data set. It’s also relatively objective, although graphs may be biased, so when you are creating conclusions, be sure not to make any assumptions that the dataset did not indicate.

Discussion

This is where the authors of the article interpret the results of their data. It’s the same as a Conclusion, except scientists often avoid using that word because it implies that the research has concluded. Most times, it hasn’t and will continue to develop over time with more studies, trials, and experiments.

The discussion breaks down how the data collected answers the hypothesis, which was introduced in the abstract and the introduction. It also dissects the real-world applications of the data and the relevance of the data (like revisiting the introduction!), which is helpful.

References

This is where you’ll find the articles and research that the authors of the articles referenced. It’s useful if you want to understand more about the topic or if you don’t understand the article you just read, because it provides the background information, but its core relevance often comes from seeing the age of the articles. In rapidly developing fields like computer science and psychology, you may not want to use an article that is based on outdated science.