The structure below is intended to guide beginning students in a critical and careful reading of scientific articles in the area of Health Sciences and Biological Sciences.
1. Publication information
a. Examine the study title, authors, institutions, countries, journal and date of publication.
b. Identify the type of publication (data article, review, comment, technical notes, editorial).
2. Summary and introduction
a. Do the authors justify the study?
b. Can you identify the purpose of the work?
3. Methodology
a. Were animals used in the study? What is the species and strain?
b. Was the study performed on humans? Were there any criteria for inclusion of these individuals (examples: gender, age, score)?
c. Did the authors perform behavioral tests? Which ones?
d. Did the authors use any pharmacological treatment? Which ones?
e. What were the experimental groups analyzed?
f. Identify the statistical tests used by the authors.
4. Results
a. Are the figures and tables presented properly?
- i. Do they have captions / axes / headings / units / scale?
- ii. Is it possible to clearly identify the groups / individuals / metrics in the figures?
B. What result did you find most interesting?
5. Discussion and conclusion
a. Do the authors relate their results to others in the literature?
b. Do the authors identify the limitations of the work itself?
c. Do the conclusions agree with the results presented?
d. Do the authors indicate future prospects for the study?
6. Post-reading
- a. Choose a concept that you did not know when reading the article and research the meaning of it. It can be a cellular component, molecule, protein, test, acronym…
Bibliography
Crato, A. N., Vidal, L. F., Bernardino, P. A., Ribeiro Júnior, H. D. C., Zarzar, P. M. P. A., Paiva, S. M. D., & Pordeus, I. A. (2004). Como realizar uma análise crítica de um artigo científico. Arquivos em Odontologia, 40(1), 5-18.
Nahas, F. X., & Ferreira, L. M. (2005). Analysis of the topics of a scientific paper. Acta cirurgica brasileira, 20(Supl 2).