Learning Communities Fall 2025: Popular vs. Scholarly Materials

After you collect your research materials, the next step in your research process is to read and analyze your sources. This page is intended to help you read academic materials in a manner that is both effective and efficient for your research.

As a complementary resource, the Using Your Search Results page on this guide offers strategies for analysis of the resources and ways to expand your search for related materials.

There are two sets of general guidelines that can be applied to reading academic writing.

Reading for Efficiency

Academic research often involves searching, sorting, and organizing materials in order to find quality sources. In order to do this efficiently, it is important to be able to evaluate resources quickly and accurately so that you are also not spending excessive time on resources that will not be useful in your research.

Reading for Understanding

Academic articles are often very dense and are written with a very specific language and structure. It is important to fully understand the context, argument, discussion, findings, and conclusions in an article, because they all influence the takeaways that can be applied to your own research.

Start Reading

Try these strategies to guide your reading of scholarly materials:

• "The Three-Pass Approach" as described in Keshav, S. (2007). How to read a paper. ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 37(3), 83–84. https://doi.org/10.1145/1273445.1273458
  • This paper outlines an effective approach to reading scholarly articles that is spread across three separate readings of the document:
  1. An initial pass to decide whether this article applies to your research and if any additional passes should be conducted.
  2. A more detailed reading that evaluates the work and focuses on the details of the information presented and furthers understanding by seeking out references.
  3. The most detailed pass where the reader reconstructs the work of the article to fully understand the process used by the authors.
  • The paper also provides an alternative reading process for when you are conducting a survey of the literature on a topic. This guidance can help with learning about the current state of research in a discipline and can also be helpful to effectively locate resources for literature reviews.
• Academic Reading Strategies from The Writing Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
  • A variety of strategies for different kinds of reading, including academic research.
  • The guide provides strategies and tools for preparing yourself for detailed reading, active reading advice, and post reading organization.