Search across guide titles, topics, keywords, and content throughout the Researcher's Field Guide.
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Different versions of the same paper can contain more than formatting changes. Learn how to identify each version, trace what changed, and decide which information is appropriate to use.
Read Guide →Not every inaccessible paper deserves the same retrieval effort. Learn how to decide when another search, library request, or author email is justified and when it is reasonable to stop.
Read Guide →A paper belongs in your literature review because it helps answer the review question and meets the criteria appropriate to your review, not simply because it appeared in your search. Learn how to make inclusion decisions consistently and transparently.
Read Guide →Relevance and methodological quality answer different questions in a literature review. A study may be highly relevant yet methodologically weak, and whether that weakness warrants exclusion depends on the review design and criteria established in advance.
Read Guide →Two papers are not necessarily two independent studies. Learn how to compare study identifiers, participants, recruitment periods, settings, methods, and other clues to determine whether publications report the same underlying study.
Read Guide →You rarely need to read every research paper from the first word to the last. Learn a practical multi-pass method for deciding what deserves attention, extracting the important evidence, and knowing when a paper requires a deeper read.
Read Guide →You rarely need to read every research paper from the first word to the last. The depth and order of your reading should depend on why you opened the paper and what you need to learn from it.
Read Guide →Not every paper you find deserves the same amount of attention. Screen its relevance first, then consider whether the evidence, methods, and role it may play in your research justify a deeper reading.
Read Guide →You do not need the same depth of understanding for every research paper you encounter. The more consequential the paper is to your argument, methodology, or interpretation, the more deeply you need to understand the parts on which you rely.
Read Guide →You do not need to scrutinize the methods of every paper during your first pass. Read them closely when your interpretation, citation, methodological decision, or confidence in a finding depends on how the evidence was produced.
Read Guide →You do not need to be a statistician to make sense of many statistical results. Start with the research question and comparison, then examine the effect estimate, its uncertainty, and what the analysis actually allows you to conclude.
Read Guide →You do not need to master every unfamiliar method before you can learn from a paper. First identify exactly what you do not understand, determine whether it matters to your purpose, and investigate it deeply enough to interpret the evidence responsibly.
Read Guide →Good research notes are not miniature copies of the papers you read. Record what you will need later: the study's question, relevant evidence, limitations, your interpretation, and why the paper matters to your research.
Read Guide →Do not extract everything simply because it appears in the paper. Capture the study's question, context, design, sample or data, relevant measures or procedures, findings, limitations, and why the study matters to your research.
Read Guide →Reading the conclusion first can frame your expectations before you inspect the evidence. That does not automatically make your interpretation biased, but it gives you a reason to check the authors' claims independently against the study's methods and results.
Read Guide →Before judging a study's findings, determine exactly what question its design and analysis were capable of answering. The stated aim is only the starting point.
Read Guide →A study may discuss exercise, AI use, stress, treatment, or lived experience while examining something much more specific. Identify exactly what was observed, delivered, or explored.
Read Guide →A study's design is defined by how participants, exposures, interventions, outcomes, and time were organized, not simply by the methodological label printed in the paper.
Read Guide →The prose surrounding a statistical result can influence how strong, important, or certain it seems. Learn how to inspect the numbers first and then evaluate whether the authors’ narrative accurately represents them.
Read Guide →A favorable subgroup finding can attract attention even when the study’s primary result is weak or inconclusive. Learn how to identify that shift and evaluate whether the subgroup effect is genuinely supported.
Read Guide →Critical appraisal is more than finding limitations. Learn how to judge whether a study asked a worthwhile question, used appropriate methods, produced credible results, and made conclusions the evidence can actually support.
Read Guide →Yes. Publication in a prestigious journal can be a useful signal about selectivity and scholarly attention, but it does not guarantee that an individual study is methodologically strong or that its conclusions are justified.
Read Guide →Every study has limitations, but not every limitation invalidates its findings. The key question is whether a methodological problem merely weakens or narrows an inference, or prevents the study from supporting its central claim at all.
Read Guide →A well-executed study can still answer the wrong question. Evaluate whether the design produces the kind of evidence required by the research question before deciding how much confidence to place in its conclusions.
Read Guide →An appropriate sample is not simply a large one. Judge whether the people, cases, records, or other units studied are suitable for the research question, how they were selected, who may be missing, and how far the resulting evidence can reasonably be generalized.
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