The Research Guide
A Guided Journal for Understanding Research Papers
Learn to read, question, and connect scientific research — one paper at a time. Not a textbook: a companion you keep beside you every time you sit down with a study.
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- Teaching spreads on how a research paper is structured
- Reusable Paper Analysis Template for every study you read
- Evidence-evaluation scorecards to sharpen your instincts
- Compare Studies pages for spotting agreement and gaps
Why learning to read research matters
Headlines compress studies into a single, often misleading sentence. Somewhere between the actual data and the sentence you read on your phone, most of the nuance — sample size, effect size, the limitations the authors themselves flagged — gets lost.
Learning to read primary research isn't about becoming a statistician. It's about being able to ask three questions of any claim: What did they actually measure? How strong is the evidence? What does this study not tell us? The Research Guide is built to make that skill practical, one paper and one page at a time.
What's inside
- A brief guide to reading a paper out of order — abstract, figures, intro, discussion, then methods
- Anatomy-of-a-paper spreads covering every section and what job it does
- Correlation vs. causation, sample size, and other core concepts explained plainly
- 120 Paper Analysis Template pages, plus notes pages for stray thoughts and questions
Who it's for
Students working through primary sources for the first time, early-career researchers building the habit of critical reading, and anyone who wants to stop taking "studies show" claims at face value — in science journalism, health decisions, or arguments with confident people on the internet.
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