When I skim an empirical paper (typically in psychology), I look at the abstract, then the figures (graphs & tables) to see the study design & results, then the methods section to see what the researchers actually did, and maybe also the results section to clear up lingering questions.
All of the main results of the paper should appear in a graph, table, which should be able to clearly convey the experimental design, the pattern of results (including effect sizes & statistical significance), and the sort of statistical analysis that was done. The figures are basically a souped up version of the abstract, which should be able to basically stand on their own to convey the study (or at least when supported by the abstract and their captions).
The methods section should make it possible to replace all of the abstract labels with concrete descriptions, e.g. “people who had this sentence included in their instructions agreed more with these statements.” (Sometimes the good stuff is in an appendix.) I want to be able to picture what the study involved from the point of view of the research subjects. This helps a lot with assessing the plausibility of the results, seeing possible alternative explanations, and with getting a sense of how much to generalize from these studies.
The results section is the place to look to get more details on analyses that were too complicated to be clearly conveyed in the figures and to check on whether their statistical analyses are kosher. How exactly did they get those “composite scores” that they have in the table? Do the results still hold if they control for this variable? Did they run this additional analysis which could help rule out that alternative explanation? Etc. (Sometimes the good stuff is in a footnote.)
When I skim an empirical paper (typically in psychology), I look at the abstract, then the figures (graphs & tables) to see the study design & results, then the methods section to see what the researchers actually did, and maybe also the results section to clear up lingering questions.
All of the main results of the paper should appear in a graph, table, which should be able to clearly convey the experimental design, the pattern of results (including effect sizes & statistical significance), and the sort of statistical analysis that was done. The figures are basically a souped up version of the abstract, which should be able to basically stand on their own to convey the study (or at least when supported by the abstract and their captions).
The methods section should make it possible to replace all of the abstract labels with concrete descriptions, e.g. “people who had this sentence included in their instructions agreed more with these statements.” (Sometimes the good stuff is in an appendix.) I want to be able to picture what the study involved from the point of view of the research subjects. This helps a lot with assessing the plausibility of the results, seeing possible alternative explanations, and with getting a sense of how much to generalize from these studies.
The results section is the place to look to get more details on analyses that were too complicated to be clearly conveyed in the figures and to check on whether their statistical analyses are kosher. How exactly did they get those “composite scores” that they have in the table? Do the results still hold if they control for this variable? Did they run this additional analysis which could help rule out that alternative explanation? Etc. (Sometimes the good stuff is in a footnote.)