Academic articles are generally written by scholars for other scholars in their area of knowledge. They’re not supposed to be immediately easy to read, but by practicing one or more of these strategic reading techniques, you’ll soon recognize familiar patterns and feel more comfortable navigating this style of writing. Don’t forget that you’re a scholar too!
- Talking with faculty, librarians, classmates, and friends is part of the process of understanding published research articles. Explaining an article to others will help you understand the paper yourself. If you’re reading as part of a class or lab, asking clarifying questions can help everyone understand the article better.
- We know there are a lot of academic articles out there! Please don’t feel pressure to read every single thing. Determine whether the article you have is what you need for your current academic/research endeavor. Using “CTRL + F” to search for keywords in the text is a quick and easy way to determine whether the article you’re looking at is actually on-topic, or whether you can skip this article and move on to something more useful.
- Approach using AI summaries to “read articles” for you with caution. Interacting with scholarly sources is an important part of being a researcher. Focus on cultivating your critical thinking skills and reflect on your learning goals and values to decide if and when to rely on AI summaries of scholarly sources. Learn more in the Critical AI Literacy topic.
- You may feel intimidated as a newcomer to reading dense academic writings. Know that this feeling (often called imposter phenomenon) is universal and there are resources to help in the Finding Your Balance tutorial module.
- Strategic reading is a set of skills that empower you to select the best articles for your research. Once you have chosen the articles worth your time, you can confidently do your own deep reading of the full article.
Note: your data is not being collected as part of the knowledge checks —this is for your learning only!