Reading a Technical Article

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)

Materials and Methods:

This section contains the nitty-gritty details of the experiments performed (volumes,
concentrations, incubation temperatures and times etc.). It is often not relevant to the reader
unless the reader is looking for protocols or to copy the experiments. For this course you will not
be required to know these kinds of details, although you should understand how the reagents
used work and what they do in a general sense.
Questions to ask while reading the Materials and Methods:
 • How does this reagent work? (The extent to which you should be able to answer
this question will generally be provided in the body of the article.)
• What did they use the reagent for?
• Is this an appropriate reagent for the experiment they are performing?
Results
This section describes the experiments performed and the results obtained, and usually
contains the figures and the majority of references to them. If there is a separate discussion
section, very little interpretation of the data may be given in here. The authors will usually state
why they performed a given experiment and the results they observed. They will sometimes
describe their controls, but usually it is up to the reader to look at the data presented in the figure
to decipher the controls. They may also mention data they obtained which is not presented in the
paper.
Questions to ask while reading the Results and Figures:
• What are they trying to prove in this experiment?
• How are they proving it? How does the experiment work?
• What controls did they use?
• Are the controls appropriate/sufficient?
• What is their sample size? Is it appropriate?
• What results did they see?
• Do you see the same results? (You may be surprised how often you don’t)
• If results are interpreted in this section, what do the results mean? Do you agree?
Discussion/Conclusion
The authors will end the paper by discussing their results in the context of previously
obtained data from other published sources. They may show how their data is supported by data
published previously, or sometimes how their data conflicts with previously published data.
Depending on the situation, they may try to downplay this conflict so their data still appears
reliable, or try to correlate their data with previous results to support their claims when the
correlation is only barely there, so read critically. They will give rationale for why their
experiments may have failed or why they may not have observed what they had hoped to. Again,
be critical. Remember that this is the discussion and the authors are often presenting theories and
models that may be more conjecture than results-based. These are ideas which you can decide to
accept or reject. They will also try to demonstrate that they have answered the question they
posed in the introduction, and will comment on questions the still remain unanswered and how
they might go about resolving them.
Questions to ask while reading the Discussion/Conclusion:
• Did the authors answer their question?
• What is their conclusion? Do you agree?
• Is their data adequately supported by previously published data?
• If the data does not agree with previously published results, do you agree with
their rationale for the discrepancy?
• Does their data support their conclusions?
• Where will they go from here?

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.