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Technical or scientific papers follow a general format; sometimes the sections are clearly
segregated with headings, other times they are blended together (as for the paper this week). It is
easy to become lost in the technical jargon of a research article, so understanding the components
of an article and asking yourself some questions while you are reading can be very helpful.
These are the questions I will be asking you in tutorial, and are the type of questions you will be
required to know for the exams. It is also important to be critical when reading a research article;
more often than one would expect the research is not as relevant as the authors claim, and more
frequently their experimental design and/or their interpretation of the data is flawed. NEVER read
an article like it is the gospel truth; read it critically.
Introduction:
In the introduction, the authors (or author) present the question they are trying to answer
in their experiments. The authors want the audience to appreciate the importance of their work,
so they provide information about what is already known about their question (background) in
addition to what is not known, and what they are therefore trying to prove. They will also usually
tell the audience how their question relates to a larger picture, such as cancer research or medical
therapies or….. to encourage the audience to continue reading.
Questions to ask while reading the Introduction:
• What is the question the authors are going to (try to) answer?
• What is the biological relevance of this research?
• What do the authors claim to have discovered? (They will often give you a one-
sentence conclusion of their research at the end of the intro)
I expect that you come to tutorials having read the papers in-depth and having done your
best to understand them so we can discuss them. I also expect that there will be terms or
experiments that you will not know or will not have understood, and I will answer those in
tutorials, so don’t be concerned if there are parts of the paper that you don’t completely
understand. Keep in mind that most of the answers to questions about the figures can be found in
the body of the paper, although they might be scattered throughout it. It just takes a bit of
hunting.