The way I read a research paper is:Read the abstract. This will give you the key context and main findings of the paper.Read the introduction. This will tell you more detail about why the authors have done the work, where the work sits in relation to whats been done before, and will generally outline the rest of the paper.Read the conclusions/summary. I then skip to the end of the paper and read the conclusions/summary. This should spell out in fairly simple terms what the main findings of the paper were, and might have some discussion about how the results could be generalised, or what they neglected in their approach. When you go through the rest of the paper you can then check whether what they said in the conclusions matches their claims/approach in the main paper.Look through the figures. If there are any plots/figures then I'll take a look through those and read the captions to try and see what the results look like.Read the rest of the paper. Only after doing that will I dive in to the details and read the rest of the paper. Sometimes I'll need to go back and forth between sections to fully understand things, and if it's going to be really useful for my research then I'll work through the theory to try and reproduce the results.
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When you're reading a paper you should try to answer these questions:What is the main purpose of the paper?Why is it difficult to do?What is the MAIN (novel) theory behind it?What are the results?What are the advantages?What are the limitations?
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