How to Read a Scientific Paper Efficiently and Critically

If you are a researcher or plan to be, an important part of becoming a successful author of academic papers is being familiar with the literature in your field. This means you must read a lot of papers. In this video, I’m going to describe a strategy that will help you read a scientific paper efficiently and critically and to extract the essential information you need. I also briefly describe how to conduct a literature search and quickly identify papers you need to read in preparation for writing a class paper or an article for publication. Use the time stamps to jump to a specific section.

00:00 Intro
01:06 Basic format of a scientific paper
01:28 Get an overview
01:44 Scan figures and tables
02:05 Questions to ponder when reading the introduction
02:40 Questions to ponder when reading the methods
03:40 Questions to ponder when reading the results
04:12 Questions to ponder when reading the discussion
04:51 Questions to ponder when reading the conclusions
06:16 How to conduct a literature search in Web of Science

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