Mastering Research Papers: Efficient Reading Strategies for EBM Enthusiasts (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Hey, hey, welcome to Sketchy EBM. As always, I'm your host, Anthony Crocco, and today I want to go through how I read most research papers. It's not uncommon that we get stuck having to read research papers. Either because you're an EBM nerd like me, or you're doing Journal Club, or you have a clinical question, at some point you're going to get stuck reading a research paper. And this can really be a daunting task. You have a lot to go through, and you know it's going to take a lot of time and a lot of effort. I want to share with you how I efficiently get through research papers. Now this isn't going to work for you all the time with all papers, and sometimes you have to go through everything in detail. But it works for me most of the time. The good news is, most research papers, whether it's a randomized control trial, or a systematic review meta-analysis, or whatever, are divided into the same six sections. You have your title and abstract, your introduction, your methods, the results section, the discussion, and then finally, the author's conclusions. So here's my average approach. I'll look at the title and abstract to answer one question. Is this topic and paper at all relevant to me or not? If the answer is yes, then I move on to read the rest of the paper. If the answer is no, I throw out the paper and move on with my life. Next is the introduction section. What you have to remember about the introduction section is the authors are trying to provide some background information. What the introduction is not is a systematic review on the topic. The authors may or may not be providing information in the introduction section that really justifies the rest of the research. It's not necessarily an unbiased review of the topic. Knowing this, I usually skip the introduction. The next section is the methods section. I consider this to be the most important part of a research paper, and I spend a lot of time looking through the methods section. What I'm looking for is what was the research design? Were there any methodologic errors? Any signs of bias that might have been generated? Issues of generalizability? All these things are going to be important. I do like to have some resource on hand to help guide me through this process, and whether that's the user's guide to the medical literature that the JAMA evidence series puts out, or some other resource, it's important that you know what the gold standard for research methodology is, and this will apply for the next section as well. If I'm happy that the quality of the research paper is good, I'm going to continue on reading the rest of the paper. If I'm not happy with the methodology, or not happy that it can be generalizable to my patient population, I'm done with the research paper and I can move on with my day. The next section is the results section, and I think this one needs to be read in detail as well. The results section should give you enough information for you to draw your own conclusions. Next is the discussion section. Here the authors are trying to give you context for their results, and really kind of tell you what the value of their research was. This is their opinion only, and as such, I generally don't read the discussion section. Finally we have the author's conclusions. Here the authors are providing their opinion, and their conclusions from their results. Since by this point you've already read the author's results, and drawn your own conclusions, the author's conclusions only offer a counterpoint for those you've already made. At the end of the day, there are really only two parts of the research paper that should be mostly objective. The methods section, and the results section. Sadly, all the other sections are highly edited, and likely to be peppered with bias. At the end of the day, what do I want you to know about how I read a paper? Well by and large, I look for the objective information in a research paper, and stay clear of the subjective content. Our objective information is going to come from the methods and results section. I want to know what did the authors do, and what did they find. Since we can think for ourselves, we can draw our own conclusions. In future episodes of SketchyEBM, we'll take the time to look at specific research types, and how to tell the good, the bad, from the ugly. I hope you enjoyed this episode of SketchyEBM. Please do take the time to evaluate, and as always, draw your own conclusions.