Reading a scholarly research article can be a little intimidating at first--especially if you haven’t spent a lot of time with them. That’s okay if you feel this way! Research articles are written for (surprise!) other researchers, and the authors assume their audience has some base knowledge of the subject matter.

You can’t always tell what an article is going to be about by its title (or even sometimes the abstract). To find meaningful connections to your topic and to follow threads of relevancy, you’ll need to take a closer look at the article itself. There are a lot of different strategies for reading a scholarly article. Consider your experience with reading them in the past. What have you done to make it easier? Any strategies you’d want to share with the class? Skipping around is more than okay (I hereby give you permission to read them out of order!), and taking lots of notes or looking up vocab words are also good practices.

Another key piece of reading a scholarly article is to understand what to expect in a research article--knowing this can help you read around an article, rather than straight through it. By this, I mean looking at the way an article is organized (sections, headers, etc.) and using that information to quickly find the information you need. This is an important technique, especially for your first read of the article.

A lot of primary research articles in the sciences use a relatively standard format. Each article has the same sections, and a practiced reader can anticipate what each section will do with some certainty. Even in the case of an article that doesn’t follow this format, the author(s) will still organize the piece into sections, and reading ahead and finding out what all the sections are can still be a good way to jump around within the article and figure out what’s in it and whether you want to give it a closer read going forward.