Writing Science –Reading Science 1
Reading Science
The Situation:
It’s 11:00. Tomorrow, for class, your teacher has said to bring a list of sources for your research project on the health impact of low back pain (acute or chronic). You bring up your favorite search engine; spend 37 minutes experimenting with keyword combinations until you have a list of 50-75 promising possibilities. Now, you must decide which of the list actually merits time and attention. How do you decide what to keep and what to send back to cyberspace?
How do you decide what are important articles?
- Titles of Articles – the first level of decision-making
- A well written title gives you the most important information about the article: its research question and (possibly) the major result
- Abstracts – the deciding factor
- A well written abstract gives you a very brief summary of everything that is important about a piece of research writing: topic, research question/ hypotheses, methods, results, conclusions, and interpretation
You examine the first two titles, and both look like good places to begin. You click on the first title: “Managing Low Back Pain” – seems pretty much right on target. Should provide lots of useful info, right? The second article, titled “The Cost Effectiveness of a back education for firefighters: a case study” also sounds cool – who doesn’t like firefighters?
You decide to begin with the firefighters and settle in to read the abstract, wondering exactly how much useful information this abstract will provide.
In fact, Abstracts provide a good deal of information that can help a reader decide if a particular article is valuable to their research. There are 5 parts that a well-written abstract usually covers:
- Topic + Research Question –explains what the article is “about,” why the writer believed the topic is important, and the specific question the research addresses
- Method – explains how the researcher got the results (sometimes the statistical analysis and equipment used), and is often critical to determining relevance to your work
- Results – explains the strongest results as “answer” to the research question
- Conclusions – explains what the researcher thinks about the results vis-à-vis the research question
- Interpretation – explains how the results should be understood and what should be done with the information
Interestingly, the information in the abstract pretty well matches the kinds of information found in the typical research report written in the typical research format: Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion. In the field of research writing, this format is called “IMRaD,” for short, and is characteristic of science papers. In fact, in most publications, the paper is obviously divided into these sections with the subtitle of each section used as a heading. Some “short reports” do not use the subheadings, but the information is still most often presented in this order.
And why follow the IMRaD format? Because it mirrors the scientific method itself (see Figure 1):
You hit a snag with the second article – reading through the abstract, you notice precious little that corresponds to the expected categories of a research article. In fact, upon examination, it seems more of an explanatory paper than a “research-y” paper – what is going on? Then you remember: it’s a review article!
A Review article is a scientific publication that covers the “state of the art” in some research area – as such, it doesn’t have the usual “IMRaD” categories. Instead, it is organized according to topics. The topics themselves may be further broken down into subtopics. In fact, the outline to a review article looks suspiciously like the topical outline to the kind of literature review paper encountered in most beginning research classes.
The abstract to a review paper addresses the topic of research and why it is important, provides a list or overview of the internal major subtopics, and also the conclusions the writer has reached regarding the practical applications or research implications for the field.