- This short video will walk you through some of the strategies for how to read a journal article. These strategies will be particularly effective for psychology journal articles that are empirical articles. And, ding, these are heuristics that usually work, but sometimes don't and can even lead you astray on occasion. 

Journals publish peer-reviewed journal articles, and there are three major kinds of journal articles, empirical journal articles, review articles, and meta-analyses. Empirical journal articles report new data and will have a methods and a results section. Review articles are a review of the literature. So they don't report new data. And meta-analyses are somewhere in between. They aggregate data from a number of articles that have already been published to give an overview of a particular effect. 

The heuristics I will describe will work for empirical journal articles but not so much for review and meta-analyses, both of which can be relatively variable in their formatting. And why does that matter? Because understanding how journal articles are formatted is key to understanding how to effectively read them. Empirical journal articles will have the following sections, an abstract, an introduction, a methods, and a results section, a discussion, and a reference section. 

Based on these sections, there are a few key places that you will typically find information necessary to understand the gist of the article. That's really what we're aiming for with this exercise, learning how to read a journal article first by learning how to effectively understand the gist of the article. 

The first thing you want to do is read the title and make a good, genuine guess about what the study is about. So for the example that we're going to be using during this exercise, I have selected this article "Motivation to Learn-- The Long-Term Mnemonic Benefits of Curiosity and Intentional Learning" by Halamish, Madmon, and Moed published in 2019. And in this article-- so it's discussing the long-term mnemonic benefits. What does that mean? The memory benefits, long-term memory benefits of curiosity and intentional learning. 

What is intentional learning? Well, trying to learn something on purpose as opposed to accidentally. So for example, using curiosity as a form of studying. So I think that's what we're probably talking about here is the long-term mnemonic. Yeah, that makes sense to me based on this title. 

Then what you're going to do is read abstract. Think of the abstract like your roadmap for the entire article. You need to study it before you head out. And if you ever get lost, it will help you find your way again. And, generally, it will follow the sections of the article itself. 

So it will describe the rationale. And that will correspond to the introduction. It will describe the method section, the results, as well as give you an overall conclusion or interpretation of the data. And that aligns with the discussion most of the time. 

So read the abstract. And, first, look for ideas that you don't understand or have questions about. Then read it to try to answer your questions. 

So skimming through this abstract, there's a couple of things that immediately pop out at me. They have measured curiosity. And how have they measured curiosity? So that's one question that I have. 

I can also see that there are two experiments. So what's the difference between the two experiments? And, finally, they discuss reward. And I'm wondering if the reward-- I'm wondering how that reward was delivered. What was the reward, and how was it delivered to participants? So how did they manipulate that? 

And so those are my-- that's my first pass. Those are some of the first questions that I have. If I dig into this and really try to read through it, I can see that curiosity was rating-- participants were asked to rate their level of curiosity about each of the trivia questions they were presented with. 

The difference between experiment 1-- the study time was either fixed or self-paced. All right, perfect. That's answered in the abstract itself. And how did they manipulate reward? Either with or without a prospective reward for correct recall in a subsequent test. All right, that's not explained here. That is something that I would need to actually read the article in order to answer that question. 

So once you've read it to answer your questions and you can't answer any more of the questions that you have, that's when you're going to move on to the introduction. But you're not going to just start right at the beginning. You're actually going to jump to right before the method section. This is where I'm actually going to switch format so that we can look at this in a PDF viewer.