Explain How to Read a Research Paper Without a Science Degree

A research paper gets shared as evidence for something and you want to know if it actually says what people claim. Reading research critically is a skill, not an academic superpower. This explains the structure of a paper, what to look for in the methods section without specialist knowledge, why statistical significance does not mean what most people think, and how to spot the gap between what a study found and what was reported about it.

Explain how to read and critically evaluate a research paper as a non-specialist, covering the parts that matter and the parts that are safe to skim.

Cover:
1. The structure of a research paper: what abstract, introduction, methods, results, discussion, and conclusion each contain and what to look for in each
2. The three questions to answer in the first five minutes: what did they test, how did they test it, and what did they find?
3. What to look for in the methods section as a non-specialist: sample size and whether it is adequate, who the participants or subjects were, and what comparison was made
4. The distinction between statistically significant and practically significant, and why this matters when reading results
5. How to spot the difference between what a paper actually found and what the abstract, press release, or journalist claimed it found

Include one worked example of a common misreading and how to avoid it.