Top tips for reading academic work

This guide covers reading academic work such as e/books and papers.

Reading books and ebooks

• Books and book chapters can be a useful starting point when reading about a subject for the first time.
• It is important to remember that they tend to present a large amount of information from one viewpoint. Whereas, reading across papers is more likely to introduce you to a variety of perspectives (provided you vary the authors you refer to).
• When reading books or sections of books, follow the guidance in the section below about criticality and note making.

Reading papers

Reading papers is time consuming, so ensure you set aside regular periods of time to do this.  The following method will help you to screen out irrelevant papers efficiently.

• Once you’ve sourced a paper, scan it to see how relevant it is to your work.
• Check to see whether it has been peer reviewed. This is a quality control process that involves academics checking the rigour of the paper prior to its publication. You do not need to know about the process in detail except that it is considered preferable to use peer reviewed articles, rather than those which have not been subject to review.  More information is available here if you’re interested in knowing more: Elsevier Researcher Academy – Peer Review Fundamentals
• If the article is likely to be relevant check the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) to ensure it is a genuine publication. When you ‘resolve’ a DOI you are going to the original version of the publication and can check it is the same as the one you have. If you cannot find the DOI of a paper, this could be because it existed before DOIs were introduced or because the paper is inauthentic. Check a paper by pasting the DOI number beginning with 10 into the resolver at the bottom of this page in the section called Try resolving a DOI name.
• You can find out more about DOIs on this page: What is a DOI?
• Once you have confirmed your source is authentic by checking the DOI read the abstract and conclusion.
• If it still seems relevant to your work, then read the discussion.
• If it still seems relevant read the paper from start to finish.