It can be difficult to make sense of scientific articles. This is often because they discuss abstract ideas that you’re not accustomed to thinking about. They may also use technical vocabulary which is new to you. Sometimes it won’t be obvious what a paper’s overall argument is. The prose may be complicated, and you may need to pick the article apart sentence by sentence and look technical terms and referenced ideas up, even read cited background papers. In this short course, we will offer some tips to make the process of reading primary research easier and more effective. The key ideas are that you should begin by skimming a research article, and recognising its key sign posts. Once you have done that, you can do a more careful read where you properly evaluate its arguments.
This short course was developed by Prof. Wendy Johnson and Dr. Zachary Horne. It was adapted from the blog post “Guidelines on reading philosophy” by Jim Pryor at New York University.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
For this short course, you’ll need to choose a scientific article to read. We’ve taken a look at a bunch of papers, and chosen 10 that we think are really suitable for this exercise. Have a look at the list below, and choose a paper that you would be excited to read. They are drawn from all across the literature on psychology, so you ought to be able to find one that interests you. The papers themselves can be downloaded from the University library.
Suggested Papers for the Critical Thinking Exercises
These are only suggestions. Any paper you’re interested in, whether you think it’s especially well done, full of ‘holes,’ or anything in between, is ‘fair game.’ Do as many as you want – the more practice, the better. A hint: the lecturer who drew up the list put these on it 1) for variety in topics, 2) likely at least casual interest, and 3) because s/he could see holes in the authors’ critical thinking. Don’t take ‘famous’ authors and/or ‘published’ – even in a ‘good’ journal – as evidence of sound basis for study, sound study design, and especially not of sound results interpretation. In fact, don’t even assume accurate reporting. Always do your own independent critical thinking outside the ‘box’ the authors hand you. You own topic-relevant experiences and psychological processes are always data too. You’re only one person – keep in mind others inevitably will not be ‘like you’ – but all it takes in one person to refute another’s idea that something is how humans ‘are.’
Palombo, D. J., Te, A. A., Checknita, K. J., & Madan, C. R. (2021). Exploring the facets of emotional episodic memory: The ‘when,’ the ‘where,’ and the ‘which.’ Psychological Science, 32, 1104-1114.
Wiley, R. R., & Rapp, B. (2021). The effects of handwriting experience on literacy learning. Psychological Science, 32, 1086-1103.
Voichek, G., & Novemsky, N. (2021). Asymmetric hedonic contrast: Pain is more context dependent than pleasure. Psychological Science, 32, 1038-1046.
Smith, A. M., Wilroth, E. C., Garchpazian, A., Shallcross, A. J., Feinberg, M., & For, B. Q. (2021). Coping with health threats: The costs and benefits of managing emotions. Psychological Science, 32, 1011-1023.
Scullen, M. K., Gao, C., & Fillmore, P. (2021). Bedtime music, involuntary musical imagery, and sleep. Psychological Science, 32, 985-997.
Leung, A., Tunkel, A., & Yurovsky, D. (2021). Parents fine-tune their speech to children’s vocabulary knowledge. Psychological Science, 32, 975-984.
Bechler, C. J., Tromala, Z. L., and Rucker, D. D. (2021). The attitude-behavior relationship revisited. Psychological Science, 32, 1285-1297.
Brown, A. R., Pouw, W., Brendara, D., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2021). People are less susceptible to illusion when they use their hands to communicate rather than estimate. Psychological Science, 32, 1227-1237.
Decelles, K. A., Adams, G. S., Howe, H. S., & John, L. K. (2021). Anger damns the innocent. Psychological Science, 32, 1214-1226.
Depow, G. J., Francis, Z., & Inzlicht, M. (2021). The experience of empathy in everyday life. Psychological Science, 32, 1198-1213.
Your second task in this course is to skim-read the article that you want to understand. The aim of skimming the article is to find out the conclusion and get a sense of its structure.
Although psychology articles tend to have the same format (i.e., Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion), the flows of the arguments in the introduction and discussion, and the rationale for descriptions of the methods and results and their levels of detail often vary from paper to paper. A good way to begin when you’re trying to read a difficult article is to skim like this first.
Pay special attention to the abstract and opening and closing paragraphs. Authors summarise there what they intended to argue, and/or what the central question driving their research was. When you figure out what the article’s main conclusion is, try to restate it in your own words. This will help you understand the central theses.
While you’re skimming the article, try to get a general sense of what the authors accomplish in each part of the introduction and how it motivates the importance of and builds the rationale for the analyses the authors report. Doing this will help you think critically about whether these reports actually test the claims made for them.