Reading Primary Literature: A Practical Guide to Evaluating Research Articles in Biology

by Scott Freeman, Kim Quillin, Lizabeth Allison

Reading primary literature is an exciting, rewarding part of being a scientist and Reading Primary Literature will help get students up to speed quickly in reading research articles. The booklet covers the parts of a research paper, succinctly explaining the aim of each section and how the paper works as a whole, and as a part of the larger world of science. Students select a paper to evaluate, and this book guides them through that evaluation with clear explanations, directions for reading and analyzing the material, and applied questions to encourage critical reading skills. A list of sources and references at the back helps students get started finding papers to read.

Genres: Science

48 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2006

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Reviews

[Ann · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great resource for students in their initial confrontation with reading peer-reviewed scientific literature. Any science writing can be difficult reading: it is very dense and often full of jargon. This booklet breaks down the different sections of a formal scientific research paper in terms of what to expect as well as questions to be raised. The booklet is useful in course work and provides questions/exercises at the end of each section that can be assigned as homework and discussed in class. The booklet ends with 10 general points to help guide future reading and a list of resources.
Highly recommended for beginning science students and those who teach an introduction to scientific literature.

[Melissa MacLeod · Rating 5 out of 5]

Easy to read, contains a lot of helpful tips for getting into Scientific Literature and understanding the components that make up a research article. Also references many helpful resources.

[Hannah · Rating 2 out of 5]

THis book is for Biology! And we never read/needed it, but I still read it. It was oh-kay, but I already knew all of it.