Reading an Article

 Steps and Procedure 

    Originally, as I have said, I was not that big into science until high school so I never actually sat down and read a scientific article until then. I will say that reading an article and taking a quiz on it is not easy, however, like with everything, practice makes perfect. 

    What I like to start with is the results. This is because the results is the "heart" of the paper and should be able to stand alone while getting the objective, hypothesis and conclusion across. Also in the results section, there should be no "raw data". This means that there should be no baseline numbers in a table even if the table looks very nice. This is because for a majority of the time, you will be comparing two different things, something that you know about and know what the result will be and the other is what you are experimenting on. So, in a paper, the results for that comparison would look something like a bar graph with properly labeled x and y-axis. 

    Next, I look at the abstract and conclusion/discussion. This more or less gives me the same answer, but one is a more condensed version of the other with all of the other parts in there too. With reading the conclusion, you can gauge a sense of how well the author can interpret the data presented in from of them. this section will also reiterate what the introduction stated; which was why the experiment was performed in the first place.