Previous students asked for advice on how to approach reading the medical literature. Here’s how Anthony Krocko (from Sketchy EBM) reads research papers. He recommends starting with the Methods section first, then Results section and disregarding the Introduction and Discussion (as these are mostly just opinion).
In the two videos above, you can see these steps in action reading NEJM’s Coffee and Pancreatic Cancer (1981) or just use this to follow along with the videos.
- Read the ABSTRACT to get a general idea of the direction in which we’re going.
- Read and interpret all the TABLES and FIGURES, using the captions if needed.
- Now you can go and read the METHODS and RESULTS. Armed with the info you learned in Step 2, this should go much more quickly.
- Now come up with your own interpretation results of the study.
- Now you can read the INTRODUCTION and DISCUSSION. Does this match with what you came up with in the step above?
Good luck and happy appraising.
patwari 