Active versus passive reading: how to read scientific papers?

Abstract

‘Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.’ Albert Einstein (1879–1955) ‘Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous.’ Confucius (551–479 B.C.) The Confucian Analects, bk. 2:15 ‘To repeat what others have said, requires education; to challenge it, requires brains.’ Mary Pettibone Poole, A Glass Eye at a Keyhole (1938) ‘How do you read a scientific paper?’ may at first seem like a superfluous question. Given how most biomedical research papers are structured,1 it might be natural for beginning (or even not-so-beginning) students to assume that one should first read the Title, then the Abstract, followed by the Introduction. Most might elect to skip the Methods section that customarily follows the Introduction (although many journals now place it towards the end of a paper), as it contains far too many technical details and is therefore boring. The Results section, which contains the meat of the paper, i.e., experimental data presented in the form of figures and tables, might receive the most attention, with the Discussion section that follows as a close second. This kind of from-the-beginning-to-the-end and word-by-word reading is known as ‘passive reading’, which can be quite laborious and inefficient. In this paper, I will discuss the concept of ‘active reading,’ which I define here simply as reading with questions in mind and search for answers. In addition, you will ask yourself what experiments you would do next if you were the authors, and then compare your ideas with what was actually done in the paper.2 Reading this way fundamentally changes your mindset because the challenge keeps you intellectually engaged. You focus only on the parts of the paper that answer your questions, and glance through the rest; your reading therefore becomes highly selective. As a result, you can read faster and learn more. Although this paper will use biomedical research papers as examples, the same principles should apply to other scientific disciplines with minor modifications. Distinguishing features of Passive vs. Active reading. If you read a paper from-the-beginning-to-the-end, word-by-word, you are obediently following a path laid down by the author(s), who as a result, are de facto regarded by you as ‘authorities’ under this circumstance [1–3]. Reading a paper this way, without a particular expectation or purpose, is ‘passive reading,’ a practice similar to what Harvard educational psychologist William Perry (1913–1998) called ‘Obedient purposelessness’ [4]. It is inefficient and boring, because: First, if you set out with the intention to simply absorb whatever information that the author(s) have chosen to feed you, it is impossible, by definition, for you to be critical at the same time. Therefore, you lose the ability to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the paper. Second, because you are approaching the paper without expectations, reading through the paper will not likely generate any surprise or ‘Eureka’ moments and therefore becomes a chore. Third, while you might learn some facts and gain a general impression of the work, passively reading will not give you a deep understanding of the rationale and experimental strategies behind the work (Scheme 1). How can you improve the efficiency with which you do your reading? As an old saying goes, ‘you see only what you know,’ meaning you will be able to see an answer as such only if you were asking the question in the first place. Chinese scholar Huang Zongxi (黃宗羲, 1610–1695; [5,6]) once wrote: ‘If you read/do research with small questions in mind, you learn small things. If you do so with big questions in mind, you learn big things. If you do so with no question in mind, you learn nothing.’ Reading with specific questions in mind puts you in the mindset of searching for little gold nuggets buried in a pile of sand. If you know what you are looking for, your eyesight is sharpened. You can coast along in a low-energy state while searching [7,8], and switch to a high-energy state (to read more thoroughly and intensively) only when you find what you are looking for. Reading in this way is highly selective, and it prolongs your attention span and is much more efficient than passive reading – which tires you out easily because you have to be on high alert the whole time. Moreover, the rush of excitement when you find the answers that you are seeking, particularly if they help solve a problem that you have or provide you with new ideas (the ‘Eureka’ moments) can be quite stimulating. Active reading is thus more productive and enjoyable than passive reading (for active vs. passive reading, see Scheme 1). An obvious caveat to the above analogy of finding gold nuggets in a pile of sand is that you must first identify sand piles that are likely to be productive. Therefore, you should first practice active reading on papers that are published in highly selective, high caliber journals,