I did my bachelor and master degrees in design studies, so I was not as trained in research and argumentation as I'd assume e.g. law-students are. Our argumentation was more about arguing for our design projects, and maybe it isn't so different, but the more you work on doing things, the worse you get at reading indepth. And I’ve never been a fast and a focused indepth reader. So I tend to go back and fourth between reading, writing and design work all the time. Read one article abstract, then extracting some information to an inspirational card on the subject or developing an idea, then writing about it, then going back to the reading. It can be very distracting, but I think it is the way my mind works in order to develop ideas and thoughts.
So I can't read research like I read novels, but I still sometimes try to. Because when I can't grasp what the article is all about from scanning, I get stuck. I've learned a bit about good ways of reading research, ways I'd previously never call "reading". If I said "I've read it", I meant in-depth. So the threshold for me to say I've read something, is probably high, and if someone asks me, I tend to say in a bit excusing way that "I've looked at it". It is a challenge for me to use references for research when I don't feel that I know the details of the research. I get scared that I'm jumping to quickly to conclusions. An overview will often be a generalization, and is not always right.
Anyway; this is a bit about how I've learned to read research:
How to read an academic article
To become better at understanding and reading academic articles, I got a task from Andrew Morrison (responsible for the center for design research at AHO) to read an academic article with four tasks in mind:
- Write a short summary
- Figure out what it really is about
- What was the main question/argument
- What methods does the researcher use
By reading articles with this in mind, I’ll become better at searching for this information in every article I’ll read. It’s basically just like what a film student would do: you dissect a film and look at all it’s means[virkemidler]in order to understand what makes a film good.
The norwegian site http://hurtiglesing.no is very useful, and especially this part, about reading academic articles.