Tips for Reading Scholarly Documents Finding information in dense scholarly articles, manuals, and textbooks can be challenging. These are not documents you want to read “front to back”. Here are some tips to help scan them for the content you need. Journal articles and studies: • Always read the abstract first. • The abstract will describe the purpose, methods, and general findings/conclusions of the article. You can then decide if the content will be relevant to your research. • Then skim the “conclusion” section (and perhaps the “results”) — it will have a heading so it’s easy to find. • The results and conclusion will give you more detail than the abstract. Once you read those, you’ll get a sense of which details in the article are most important to your report; then you can go back through the rest of the article to read more as needed. Textbooks, handbooks, technical manuals: • These will usually have both a table of contents (near the beginning) and and index (at the very end). Use these to find the content you need. • A table of contents will list main topics and subtopics discussed within the document • An index lists very specific terms and subjects and tells you on which pages those terms are mentioned within the document • If a document doesn’t have a table of contents or index, scan it quickly for the content you need by looking at the headings and subheadings (they’ll usually be in bold, set apart from the rest of the text).
