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Today I did a presentation for @hgse master's students on how to read a research paper in 15 minutes. Thought I'd share my suggestions. Thread follows.
(Research nerds: This is how to read research for PRACTITIONERS, not researchers - I promise I love your methods section.)
(Research nerds: This is how to read research for PRACTITIONERS, not researchers - I promise I love your methods section.)
The audience for research papers is other researchers, not practitioners--so practitioners have to dig to find what they want to know.
Also, a potentially controversial opinion: I think practitioners should generally look for meta-analyses, synthetic literature reviews, and other summaries. That one paper you came across randomly might not be representative of the literature overall.
But, if you DO want to read a research paper*, where should you focus? My recommendation is R3I: relevance, impact, importance, inference.
*I focused mainly on quantitative studies attempting to establish a causal claim, though much of this advice applies more generally.
*I focused mainly on quantitative studies attempting to establish a causal claim, though much of this advice applies more generally.
RELEVANCE comes first. Are the intervention & outcomes ones you care about? Is the context similar - not just student demog but also governance, historical and cultural context, etc? Do we know why & how this intervention worked & whether you can create the same conditions?
If the study is relevant, then move on to the three Is.
IMPACT: What is the direction & magnitude of the impact?
IMPORTANCE: Are the findings statistically and practically significant?
INFERENCE: Can we infer that the treatment *caused* the outcome?
IMPACT: What is the direction & magnitude of the impact?
IMPORTANCE: Are the findings statistically and practically significant?
INFERENCE: Can we infer that the treatment *caused* the outcome?
Where to find R3I in an academic paper: the abstract, intervention & context, and discussion sections
Practitioners, I hereby grant you permission to skip all the Greek, guilt-free. If something about the methods is super-important for interpretation or limits how we can generalize from the findings, it's the researchers' obligation to mention it in the abstract or discussion.
Finally, no presentation would be complete without a random meme. (Hat tip to my fabulous teaching fellow, Parastoo Massoumi, for the design concept.)
Hope this thread is helpful!
Hope this thread is helpful!
