Speaker 1: Hey everyone and welcome back to my channel, so this video is kindly sponsored by Skillshare, an online learning community for creatives. I'll be telling you a bit more about their inspiring classes at the end of this video. A topic that I get asked quite a bit and it's about reading research papers and sort of whether you need to read from the start to the end and every single detail. And the answer to that is absolutely not. And today I'm going to go through exactly how you want to read a research paper in about, I mean, 15 to 20 minutes, depending on how much detail you want to go into. So I've been reading on Notability. It's a great app where you are able to import a PDF, highlight, scribble, write on it without having to actually print anything out. So it's a great resource and I'd highly recommend you to download and take a look. As you can see, just unwrapped the pen and there's some ASMR for you right there. By reading research papers like this, you're enabling yourself to have sort of a disciplined approach and prevents you from drowning in the details before you even get a bird's eye view. Every paper does not need to be read in the depth that it presents itself in. So it's important to be able to quickly skim through the important details before you decide to dive in and read the whole paper. So starting off, you want to look at the title of the paper as this is probably the best and biggest selling point and the most important few words where you might have some keywords that are included and give you an idea of the topic that's about to be discussed. You can see here I'm pulling out the method and I'm also pulling out what the result is. You then want to move on and look at the abstract. Now the abstract is usually written in a few kind of sections and it's quite consistently written like this. So you can just pull out these bits of information. The first is the background, sort of the why. Why is it that this paper is written? What is the gap in literature and the gap in research that it is trying to fill? You then want to look at the methods just quickly. Is it an animal study? Is it a human study? And then you want to look at the results quickly and the discussion or the conclusion. So there's sort of a couple parts that you almost always have in the abstract and you can very quickly just pick them out. And again, at this point you can decide, well, actually this isn't something that I'm interested in or it is something that you're interested in and you can keep on reading from there. You then want to take a look at the first and the last paragraph of the introduction. Again, this just gives you a bit of a background and helps you understand what the hypothesis is and helps you understand what the research aims are of this particular paper. The first paragraph, because that usually gives you the sort of general background. And the last paragraph, because typically the last paragraph tells you their sort of intention and kind of summarises what's to come. And again, it allows you to sort of understand why the paper's being written, what their research aims are and their hypothesis is, and sort of a summary of their methods as well to come. It's quite nice. It's definitely the last paragraph is something that I always look at, even if I don't always look at the first paragraph. You then want to move on and take a look at the subsection headings of the results. Now, this might seem a bit random because the methods come next, but the methods aren't really important unless you're looking to copy the paper and do the study in a slightly different way. The methods are not really that important. So I'll jump straight to the results and I'll look at the titles of the subsections. And typically the titles are a quick snippet of the result that's to come. So usually what papers will do when they're writing up their results is give you a quick sort of summary in the title, in the subtitles. You then want to move on and look at the conclusion. Now, it might seem like you've jumped quite far ahead, but really at this point you understand what the results are, you know what the paper is trying to achieve and what their research aims are. So you can just jump to the conclusion to get a quick summary. And as you can see, it's a very short summary of what this paper found. And to be honest, you don't really need to look beyond this point, especially if you're not looking at the paper in too much depth. At this point, you'll understand what they've done, how their paper fits into the literature and how their paper fits into the research space and their final kind of their unique results. And that's all you really need to know at this point. But if you do want to go into more depth, you can look at the results and kind of look at the graphs or the tables or the figures or whatever it is that you've got in front of you at a bit more depth and pick out some significant results. And this could be in the form of a graph, as you can see here, there's a particular very significant result. And you can just kind of take a look at that point now and just remind yourself to take a look at it in more detail, maybe later on. And again, this kind of gives you an overview of what this paper is showing in a bit more depth and can allow you to interpret that for your own research. You then want to look at the limitations. Now, this paper is quite nice because it has got its own little section for limitations, which allow you to sort of understand what the flaws were or what some barriers and challenges were that were faced by that particular study. And lastly, but definitely not least, I always try to highlight a couple of other references that may be cited in this particular paper that I think are interesting and that could be useful for my own study. Now, there could be there might be a paper where they reference and they've said that this study has shown X, Y and Z and we're basing our study on this. And I might I might find that really interesting. I might want to look at that myself. I tend to highlight those papers and try to take a look at it at a later date. And that's it. You're pretty much done. Now, that wasn't very, very long at all. So starting off, always look at the title, pull out your keywords, then look at your abstract, identify sort of the results and the methods. Then you want to read the first and the last paragraph of your introduction or the literature review. You then want to take a look at the results and just quickly skim through the titles to get a kind of gauge what what the research is that they've actually found and what the results are and sort of the key results, if you like. You then want to read the conclusion very quickly just to summarise and get a summary of what the paper actually found. And then if you want to go into more detail, look at the results and try to identify and pull out some key results that you think could be applicable, could be interesting for you and your study. And then, like I said, in this case, we have got some limitations here. So that could be something to look at as well, just to for contextualising the study and understanding what the challenges were. And the last but not least, pull out a few references that you can take on and keep on reading to understand a bit more about the context and a bit more about this particular research field and what else there is out there. Now, what I've described is sort of a first pass where you're just understanding the theoretical basis, you're understanding kind of what kind of paper this is and what contribution this particular study has contributed to their research field. And if you do want to go into more depth, then, of course, you do have to look into more depth as to the methods and sort of the exact results and maybe the stats and the figures. But really, for most papers, I would say for sort of 75% of papers that you read, this would suffice. You've actually taken out quite a lot of information already just from doing a quick overview, as I have done. So as I mentioned earlier, Skillshare is sponsoring this video. So thank you so much, Skillshare, as always. It's an online learning community for creatives where millions come together to take the next step in their creative journey. And Skillshare is essentially for lifelong learners. As you guys know, I am a huge advocate of learning. And I really love Skillshare because it includes a combination of video lessons and also projects. And Skillshare also has classes that can fit any schedule and any skill level. So you don't have to be an expert. So you're able to come into Skillshare, a platform that has no ads, and it's created specifically for learning. They're always launching loads of premium classes, so you can always stay focused and kind of go wherever your creativity takes you. And guess what, guys? It's less than $10 a month. And I actually wanted to show you guys what I was watching the other day. I have been struggling a lot with my emails. I've got so many email addresses now, especially with the new business. I've been following this class called Email Productivity, Work Smarter with Your Inbox by Alexandra Samuel. She's a tech writer and email conqueror. And actually, one thing that I learned, which I found so profound, is that you can actually use filters in your inbox. Guys, did you guys know this? Because my jaw dropped. So you can actually set up some filters. So when an email comes in with a specific keyword, it can go into a specific inbox or a specific part of your email. And so then you kind of automatically filter in your email without having to spend so long just doing that filtration yourself. I love that. I had to open my laptop straight away to find out how I can do that because, oh my gosh, guys, it's changing my life. I'm serious. If you are interested, then the first 1,000 of my subscribers to click in the link in the description will get a free trial of premium membership so you can explore your creativity. So like I said, don't forget to click on the link in my description. 2021 is around the corner and you never know what you can learn, what you can explore, and what you can discover. It's a brand new year. So don't forget to click on the link in my description and let me know if you're learning something because I'd love to know what you guys are learning too. So don't forget to subscribe to my channel to see more from me. I hope that this video was helpful. And leave me your comments down below as to how you read papers. Do you also do a similar technique as me or are you someone who likes to read every word to word? Don't do that. I'll see you guys in my next one. Okay, bye.