Manuscript analysis
• What is the overall goal of the research?
• What were the authors’ hypotheses?
• How does the research fit into the context of its field? Does it attempt to settle a controversy, or show the validity of a new technique, or open up a new field of inquiry?
• Do you agree with the author’s rationale for studying the question in this way?
Methods:
• What was the experimental design?
• Were the measurements appropriate for the questions the researcher was addressing?
• What statistical tests were performed?
• Often, researchers need to use “indicators” because they cannot measure something directly–for example, using babies’ birthweight to indicate nutritional status. Were the measures in this research clearly related to the variables in which the researchers (or you) were interested?
Results
• What are the important findings?
• What do each of the figures show?
• Were enough of the data presented so that you feel you can judge for yourself how the experiment turned out?
• Did you see patterns or trends in the data that the author did not mention? Were there problems that were not addressed?
Discussion
• What were the conclusions drawn from the data?
• Are these conclusions over-generalized or appropriately careful?
• Are there other factors that could have influenced, or accounted for, the results?
• What further experiments would you think of to continue the research or to answer remaining questions?
