How to Read and Critique a Scientific Research Article

Notes to Guide Students Reading Primary Literature (with Teaching Tips for Faculty Members)

Foong May Yeong

• Publisher: WSPC
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9789814579186
• Topic: Scienze biologiche
• Subtopic: Scienza generale

Given the explosion of information and knowledge in the field of Life Sciences, adapting primary literature as materials in course work as part of active learning seems to be more effective in improving scientific literacy among science undergraduates than the pure transmission of content knowledge using traditional textbooks. In addition, students also read research articles as part of undertaking laboratory research projects useful for preparing them for graduate school. As such, a good grasp of reading and analytical skills is needed for students to understand how their research project contributes to the field that they are working in. Such skills are being taught at UK and USA universities. In Asia, this approach in teaching has not yet been as widespread, although similar ideas are beginning to be used in education. Written as a quick guide for undergraduate students and faculty members dealing with scientific research articles as part of a module or research project, this book will be useful, especially in Asia, for students and faculty members as the universities look to incorporating the use of scientific research articles in their undergraduate teaching.

For Life Science students, the first time they encounter a primary literature can be rather daunting, though with proper guidance, they can overcome the initial difficulties and become confident in dealing with scientific articles.

This guidebook provides a structured approach to reading a research article, guiding the reader step-by-step through each section, with tips on how to look out for key points and how to evaluate each section.

Overall, by helping undergraduate students to overcome their anxieties in reading scientific literature, the book will enable the students to appreciate better the process of scientific investigations and how knowledge is derived in science.

Contents:

• Introduction
• How to Search for an Article
• Anatomy of a Typical Scientific Article
• A Brief Insight into How Scientific Articles Get Published in Journals
• The Introduction Section: Background Information on the Topic of Research
• More on the Introduction Section: Hypothesis or Question that the Authors were Investigating
• The Materials and Methods Section: Reagents and Techniques Used in the Study
• The Results Section: What were the Important Observations Made?
• The Discussion Section: What were the Main Conclusion(s) Made by the Authors Arising from the Data?
• What are Your Views on the Article?
• Writing Activities Related to Critiquing an Article
• Final Words

Readership: Undergraduate and graduate students.

1

Introduction

The first time you are tasked to read a research article describing original research findings, try not to let the unfamiliarity of the article layout and the perception that research articles are incomprehensible deter you. First of all, do not feel that you have to understand the entire paper at one reading, as some of us take a few readings to appreciate the implications of the data presented in the entire article,¹ even after we have gone on to graduate school and beyond. Secondly, reading research articles improves with experience, so with more experience reading articles, you will get better and better as you go along. If it is your first attempt at reading a scientific research article, you might want to break the reading into several steps and go through the article systematically. It could help you to keep the key points in Table 1.1 in mind as you start. In that way, you will not feel too overwhelmed by the details, which you will be able deal with in a progressive manner subsequently (see following the chapters).

When you are reading scientific articles, it is crucial that you not merely read the articles and accept blindly all the points laid out in the article. Rather, you should gradually develop skills needed to analyse the information and data critically. Hence, a good practice is to read through the article and as you do so, gradually gather the essential information as outlined in Table 1.1. After the initial reading to get at the basic information such as the background details and main objectives of the research work, you could re-examine the article more carefully in subsequent readings to judge for yourself if the data reported in the research article were reliable, valid and consistent with current understanding in the field. You can then further assess whether you agree with the authors’ analysis of their data and conclusions in the Discussion section.

Table 1.1 Several Points Students could Bear in Mind as They Read Research Articles for the First Time

(I)	What was the current state of knowledge in the field that the research work was described in the article? This information will be found in the Introduction section of the article.
(II)	What was the idea tested in the article? This information will be found at the end of the Introduction section of the article.
(III)	What were the key techniques used in the experiments described? This information will be found in the Materials and Methods section of the article.
(IV)	What were the data obtained in the study? This information will be found in the Results section of the article.
(V)	What were the conclusions drawn by the authors from their data? This information will be found in the Discussion section of the article.

You might question why it is necessary for you to examine the article critically, if publishing in a scientific article usually means that experts in the field have already evaluated the work and deemed it of sufficient quality and novelty to warrant its publication. Well, as it turns out, even in scientific research where there is supposed to be objectivity in the way experiments are carried out, interpreted and reported, it is still run by scientists who might have their own preferred ideas and biases (scientists are after all humans). As such, articles are selected for publication not necessarily because the work represents an objective truth. Rather, articles are published because they have crossed the sometimes arbitrary threshold for novelty and technical requirements as accepted in the respective fields.

Moreover, there is also the possibility that more than one explanation could account for a biological phenomenon being studied and so, there might be issues that were not brought up in the article. So do not be too quick to decide that all that have been reported for a particular issue in an article means that the question that the researchers were working on is completely solved. You should also understand that not everything is included in a research article that is, on average, 5,000 words in length with a limit of 6 to 8 figures for data, depending on the journal. So, authors have to restrict the amount of data that they report. The reported work is therefore incomplete at times and far from perfect most times.

Hence, for you as a student, reading an article not only means learning from the authors in terms of the background information and ideas presented, but also, understanding that one should accept the ideas reported only if they are substantiated by the evidence in the form of experimental data. It is the skill to judge the strength of the data and how well the data support the authors’ hypothesis that is pertinent to your development as a Life Science student.

How then do you “judge” the article? As with most things, it is easier if you broke your evaluation of the article down into several steps so as not to get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information in the article. You could assess the article by individual sections, and for each section, assess its strengths and weaknesses (Fig. 1.1). Such a critical examination or critique of the research article is the basis for how other researchers assess the quality and impact of the work. Of course, you should know that to critique an article does not mean that you have to find only weaknesses in the article. Rather, it actually means that you have to decide, based on your prior knowledge or other evidence, whether or not what is stated in the article makes logical sense and is substantiated by experimental data.

Fig. 1.1 Questions useful for evaluating the work described in the research article.

In relation to critiquing an article, it should be noted that for any point in the article that you consider a weakness, it is good to suggest ways to overcome the weakness, or propose alternatives to what the authors have stated. For instance, you might consider that the data reported in the article was not sufficiently convincing to support the authors’ claims due to the lack of controls. You could then think about the types of controls needed to be included in theory that could improve the validity of the authors’ assertions. This is constructive criticism² and should always be practiced, as it is too easy to criticise a piece of work without providing any concrete suggestions. In other words, critique does not mean criticise.

Obviously when you are reading the article, you are not likely to write directly to the authors of the article with your suggestions. However, you could do this in the form of a thought experiment, or discuss with a classmate to train yourself to identify what in the article, is a weakness (for example, the experimental approach used), why it is a weakness and if you think something is amiss in the article, how to improve it (such as thinking of a better experimental strategy). Conversely, for an article that you think is good, you should also be able to justify why you consider it to be so. For example, the article could be good because of the authors’ experimental design that allowed them to investigate a biological process using three different approaches. This could have led to a high level of reliability and validity in their findings that supported the conclusions the authors made.

In the following chapters, we will make use of the questions highlighted in Table 1.1 and Fig. 1.1 to guide you in making sense of a research article and reading it critically. This is not an exhaustive reference book detailing every tool you will need (such as how to use appropriate statistical tests or how to use various experimental techniques), but rather, to point out to you what you should look out for when reading a research article. Different examples from various fields of life science topics are used for illustrating specific points, so it is important that you understand the principles behind the issues I am discussing, as the ideas provided are transferable no matter which field you are interested in.

¹ For faculty members dealing with first or second year undergraduates, I find that reiterating this point is important. Most undergraduates are capable of learning to read a research article even at their junior levels but are mostly intimidated by the idea of having to read a highly technical paper. A little reassurance will go a long way towards assuring students that research articles are not always specialised articles that only scientists can understand.

² From my own experience, some students tend to be a little too eager to criticise without a good basis. This stems perhaps from their inexperience and the misunderstanding that critique is equal to criticism. As such, getting them to think about why they think a particular issue in the article is a weakness and how they can suggest ways to improve the issue is an effective way for faculty members to demonstrate constructive criticism. Also, students should be reminded that they should state what is good about a particular issue as well, as critique does not mean looking at the negative aspects of the article.

2

How to Search for an Article

One of the initial steps to reading a research article is to find and retrieve the full article. In certain cases, your lecturer could provide you the article in its entirety. In other instances, you might only be provided the title and names of the authors of the article. You then have to look up the articles and download them at the appropriate journal or library websites. It is good to learn more about which search engines or databases are used routinely for finding and retrieving articles of interest.

When presented with the task of looking up articles, you have several key search engines to use to retrieve the articles of interest (Fig. 2.1). In such instances, the article information provided to you could be the authors’ names or titles of articles. For Life Science and Biomedical articles, one key search engine is called the “Pubmed” hosted at the NCBI website (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed). You can also use Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com) or Web of Science or Science Direct (subscription required — usually accessible through your University library) to search for articles.

Pubmed is an example of a public online bibliographic database accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. This is a very powerful database that is maintained by the U.S. National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health. The nature of the Pubmed is such that it not only serves as a bibliographic database for published works, but it is also a repository of the articles depending on the access that journals provide. For instance, in addition to providing bibliographic information of the articles of interest to you, there are also hyperlinks out from each article listed to the full articles hosted at journal websites. In most cases, these journal websites require a subscription in order that the full article can be downloaded. If the library at your university subscribes to the specific journal in question, then you could easily download the article by going through your library service; most university libraries will allow matriculated students to access journals through the specific library links.

Fig. 2.1 Information needed to search for articles using specific databases.

For research work funded by NIH and Welcome Trust, articles published in the various journals are made freely available at Pubmed. For certain journals, the authors pay a fee to the publisher so that everyone can access their articles in the journal. In other instances, journals might have adopted the Open Access format, while yet other journals make articles freely accessible a year after the initial date of publishing an article. How you can find out if a full article is available for download is to click on the link at Pubmed that would bring you to the journal that the article is published in.

At the journal website, you will find a link to a file. If it is an open-access file or if your institution has access to the article, you will be able to download the article in full. Otherwise, you will be prompted to sign in with a password. For articles with restricted access, you could find out if it is possible to request your library at your university to purchase a copy for you. The articles in journals can typically be viewed in a html format or downloaded in the pdf format. For certain articles, additional information might be provided in a Supplemental file that would provide detailed technical information on a specific protocol or technique. For those who want to find out more of how to make use of Pubmed, a quick-start guide is available at: (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK3827/#pubmedhelp.PubMed_Quick_Start), and a video tutorial (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/disted/pubmed.html) is available for first-time users.³

The other search engines such as Google Scholar or Web of Science or Science Direct function similarly to allow you to find your article of interest. Again, depending on the journals, the articles might or might not be available for downloading in full from these search engines. As mentioned above, you could alternatively directly look for your article at the journal website. This means going to the journal website and making use of the search function at the website to find your articles. Obviously this is a narrower search engine compared with Pubmed as it normally allows you to search for journal-specific articles. For the journals published by larger publishers, these search engines might be linked to the publisher’s database that would allow you to search across various related journals under the publisher.

The easiest format to download is the pdf file that you could save and annotate...