How to quickly get the gist of a research article?
Finding relevant and useful reference articles tends to be a time-consuming task, but it doesn’t have to be. To get the gist of a research article, read the abstract!
When opening up a paper, know what you’re looking for.
The abstract can be found at the start of the paper, and it usually has four main components:
- The first few sentences state the reason for the study, or the why statements. Here you can see a brief introduction to the research problem, as well as an overview of the conducted research.
- The middle portion tells us about the methods employed in the study; or how things were done. This portion gives an overview of the methodology of the study.
- After that, the key results are stated, and this tells us what the study achieved. Here, we can see the information acquired from carrying out the methodologies.
- And finally, the last part of the abstract lays out the conclusions and implications of the study. Since research is conducted with a purpose, this segment addresses the question: “so what?“
If reading the abstract won’t suffice, another way to quickly know if a paper is relevant to your own study would be by using Crtl+F or the Find or search function. On iOS devices, this would be the Command+F keyboard shortcut.
By typing in keywords of interest in the search field, you can get a glimpse if the paper would be a useful reference article.
REMEMBER:
You can quickly determine if a research paper is relevant to your needs, simply by reading the abstract.
The abstract contains the reason for the study, the methods employed, the key results obtained, and the conclusion and implications of the study.
Work smart to save time and effort! Use the search in document function (Crtl+F) to determine if a paper is relevant to your own study.
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