There are enough courses that will instruct you. Large Publisher have there own recommended methods, see Elsevier and Springer.

There is no "trick" to reading and understanding - although there are "tricks" to writing an article people want to read!!! In order to avoid some of these problems, I was once advised to do the following (it may work for you, but you should try to read the whole paper until you know the field):

1) Read the abstract - this is the meat of the paper and should represent what was found that is significant.

2) Look at the figures and figure legends. Try to understand what they did without reading the results. See if you believe their staining, westerns, qRT-PCR, whatever. See if you think they did the right controls. This is really the substance of the paper.

3) Ignore the Discussion - not my advice - what he meant was to make your own conclusions based on the data presented without being influenced by the conclusions of the authors. Take this as you will.

This is the QUICK and dirty way to read papers - I don't advocate it for everyone or every paper.

Good luck! Also, don't be afraid to read papers outside of your area of expertise. Ignore the techniques or nomenclature you don't understand and try to understand the bigger point of the paper (don't get caught up in the find detail, causing you to stop reading the paper).

In my view, you can start with reading reviews about the subject. And that start reading research papers. When I started, I read several papers many times to get custom with the scientific terms, methods etc etc.Reading around ten papers a week will help you a lot to learn to read papers. After a while, you need only an hour to read a paper properly.

Hi Manish,

I wana share my personal opinion in this regard. The way I read articles vary depending upon my role. If the purpose is just to learn new methods, techniques, possible ideas or just to keep me updated in the areas of my interest, I read very selectively by finding the new advancements, methods and ideas. Usually by going through the abstract at a glance to get an overall idea and sense and then the introduction and conclusion/discussion section. I then try to read the methods and results section in detail if the previous sections attract me.

When I am reviewing or editing an article I become more thorough and I read entire article very very carefully because this time I am not handling the exact area I work on, there could be a 50% match with my interest and rest is allied but little different. Where I also need some extra homework to understand the logic or the ideas behind. There I put enough attention in the references and citations as well for more background information.

The is one old thread available in RG where similar question what you asked has been answered and discussed extensively.

https://www.researchgate.net/post/How_you_read_a_research_article?ev=tp_feed_post_xview

Best-

I would add that often, to fully understand a given article, you may need to read some or many of the referenced articles as well. Due to space limitations, and maintaining focus, most papers cannot begin to explore the previous work upon which their own is based so you may need to pick out at least some of the key references and read those as well. Usually, the important ones, or those with the broadest perspective (like reviews) will be mentioned in the introduction.

The more familiar you are with the field, the less you find yourself having to do this since you likely know much of the referenced literature as well. But then, the farther afield you go from your own background, the more likely you need to pour through some of the references.

Dear Manish, The proper understanding of research articles or reviews is achieved gradually. Young scientists have to acquire a certain scientific level of knowledge before they can properly understand such papers. I would like to note 2 paradoxical points for students/young researchers: 1- Reading articles or reviews is very instructive for their knowledge development because of the "scientific updates" found there. 2- Reading high-level papers can cause them to ignore basic scientific information they still need for the correct research advances. So you have to maintain an equilibrium between these edges.