Outline of a research paper

Research papers in many fields, particularly the sciences, often contain the following main sections:

• Abstract: A short overview of the full paper, giving highlights of the motivation and background, the research question, the data, and the results.
• Introduction: A broad overview of the research question the authors want to study, motivation for studying this question, and the authors’ approach to answering their question. The introduction often starts very general, then narrows to the specific question addressed in this paper. More detail is provided in the introduction than in the abstract, and more time is spent on motivation and related literature.
• Methods: The data and analysis techniques used to answer the research question. This typically describes the what the data looks like, how and where it was collected, and any statistical tools (e.g. visualizations, regression, hypothesis testing) that were used when analyzing the data.
• Results: A summary of the analysis results, such as figures showing regression fits, and tables of regression coefficients and p-values.
• Discussion: A discussion of the analysis results, in context of the original research question. In this section, explanations for why particular results were observed may be proposed.
• Conclusion: A short summary of the paper and its key results, and their connections to broader scientific questions. The conclusion is often the reverse of the introduction: it starts with the specific question addressed by this paper, then discusses the implications of this research for science in general.

Reading a research paper

Reading a research paper, particularly in a field in which you are not an expert, can be challenging. The trick is to skim the paper for the most relevant information, and skip over technical details that are not essential to understanding the key take-aways. The questions below will guide you to the most important sections in the paper by Binfet et al.

The Abstract and Introduction

A good place to start is often with the Abstract and Introduction, which allow you get an overview of the paper, and usually don’t contain too many technical details. The Abstract is more succinct than the Introduction, but it also provides less motivation. When the Introduction is long, you may want to skim for key details.

Read the Abstract, and skim the Introduction (I recommend focusing on paragraphs 1, 2, 6, and 7). Then answer the following questions.

So far, we know what questions the researchers are trying to answer, and we know that they used a randomized controlled trial to answer it. Our goal for the rest of the paper is to understand how the authors conducted this analysis. In particular, we want to answer the following questions:

• Who participated in the trial?
• What did the researchers record about each participant?
• What statistical methods did the researchers use to investigate their hypotheses?
• What did the researchers conclude from their study?

This information is provided in the Methods and Results sections of the paper. These sections also contain lots of other details which is valuable, but not crucial to understand on a first reading, so we will focus on the most important parts of the Methods and Results.

Study Participants

Read the Student Participants and Procedure subsections of the Methods, and then answer the following questions.

When reporting on human subjects research, it is very important that study participants should not be identifiable in the data – that is, we should not be able to determine the identities of individual participants from the information reported in the paper. This is key to protecting participants’ privacy.

Potential research subjects must meet certain criteria, defined by the researchers, to participate in a study. Inclusion criteria define requirements for inclusion in the study (e.g., a target age range or social group), while exclusion criteria are reasons a subject would be asked not to participate (e.g., certain medical conditions).

Data Collection and Analysis

Now that we know who was studied, we want to know what data was collected about each participant, and how it was analyzed. Read the Procedure, Analytic Plan, Hypothesis 1, and Hypothesis 2 and Hypothesis 3 subsections of the Methods, and skim the subsection headings for measures of wellbeing and measures of illbeing. Then answer the following questions.

Results

Finally, let’s see what the researchers concluded from their statistical models. Details are provided in the Hypothesis 1 and Hypothesis 2 and Hypothesis 3 subsections of the Results. Read these subsections, then answer the following questions.