Page Mission
In Principles of Ecology, we often expose students to styles of learning and teaching that they have yet to experience in college, or skills they may need to polish. On this page, I have assembled a growing list of resources for my students that should help them better understand primary literature and scientific articles.
Reading Primary, Scientific Literature
What is peer-reviewed scholarly literature?
What Makes a Journal Scholarly? An interactive guide. [broken link]
Popular Literature vs. Scholarly Peer-Reviewed Literature: What's the Difference? [broken link]
Review the below resources on how to approach reading and understanding a scientific article.
How to read and interpret a graph - The 2-step process explained in this 1 page PDF document is a great resources for novice and experienced interpreters of graphical data.
Reading Articles - A succinct approach to reading articles - a good refresher. [broken link]
Evaluating a Paper - This source provides a more in depth explanation of how articles or organized and it has a thorough description of what you should look for when reading and evaluating articles. [broken link]
For most, reading is seeing.
I am a visual learner so when reading scientific articles I prefer to use two different highlighter colors, or what I will call the two-color approach. We have all been known to highlight entire paragraphs while reading texts, thinking all the content is important. This action is understandable on a first read because we may have difficulty seeing the bigger picture, and thus, what is especially important and relevant.
Why the two-color approach?
The two color approach helps you, the reader, gain a more thorough understanding of the article and encourage critical thinking by helping you identify vocabulary, substantive phrases (e.g., hypotheses), and areas you may not understand or have questions. This approach is particularly useful upon revisiting an article while studying or referencing it in an essay or paper.
To start: get two different highlighter colors, for example, yellow and orange. (Two different colored pens work, too.) Scan the article as discussed in the resources above.
First Full Read: Use Yellow, or the lighter color, during your first full pass of the article. This is when I am liberal with my highlighter use, as are most.
Second Read: Orange, or the darker color, should be used for your second full pass, highlighting key terms, concepts and content. You will likely re-highlight some portions of the article - this is to be expected. (Hence, use the darker color second.)
Because you are giving the article a more in-depth read at this point, write additional notes, summaries, or questions in the margins.
A visual example of the two-color approach.
First Full Read:
"The two color approach helps you, the reader, gain a more thorough understanding of the article and encourage critical thinking by helping you identify vocabulary, substantive phrases (e.g., hypothesis), and areas you may not understand or have questions about. This approach is particularly useful upon revisiting an article while studying or referencing it in an essay or paper."
Second Full Read: Note how key words/phrases stand out.
"The two color approach helps you, the reader, gain a more thorough understanding of the article and encourage critical thinking by helping you identify vocabulary, substantive phrases (e.g., hypothesis), and areas you may not understand or have questions about. This approach is particularly useful upon revisiting an article while studying or referencing it in an essay or paper."