 Welcome to this ELC self-learning video. This video looks at the time-efficient way to read academic articles. Many students find that the most stressful part of university learning is having to read a huge number of academic articles in a very limited time. Reading academic articles is not an easy task and sometimes you may find it quite time-consuming and energy-draining. But reading them is actually beneficial. You will not only gain background information but also build up some useful vocabulary about the topic you're studying. Academics generally give the latest updated research findings and ideas in scholarly publications. They do their professional discussion in journals which are mostly aimed at other experts in the field. That's partly why academic articles are sometimes hard to read and understand. Though it is not easy, you can get through the process by following these tips. Let's look at the basic format of academic article first. Most of the time you will find these sections title, abstract, keywords, introduction, literature review, methodology, findings, discussion, implication, conclusion and references. Not every report will contain all of these and sometimes the names may change but those are the major headings. Once you understand what each section does you will be able to locate it easily when you read academic articles. The title and abstract are usually the first two things that appear in an academic article. You should always read the title and abstract. They're incredibly useful. They will give you an overview of the topic that the article discusses. They will help you decide whether the article is really related to what you're looking for. Then you need to find the keywords if they are given and the introduction. Keywords are useful for searching journal articles with similar research topics. This will speed up your journal searching process. Look at the introduction which can often be found in the first two paragraphs. Here you can see the definition of the article title and what makes this research interesting. Therefore the first four parts on the list are must reads. The literature review usually comes after the introduction. Some academics call it literature or previous work. Some writers may even name the part with the theory they are going to mention in this part. The literature review tells you the history of related research on the same topic. It might be interesting to you but it is not necessary to read it to understand the article. Methodology is another part that you might skip at this stage. Some writers may call it method, research process or procedure. This part refers to how the research was carried out. Afonst researchers often follow the steps the authors used to conduct their research and make comparisons between different research methods. However, this is not necessarily useful to you if you are looking for background information. Findings or results show you what the researcher got from the research process. You can skip this part too if you find it too complex, especially if it only covers statistical data. Discussion, implication and conclusion may appear in articles separately or in one single part. I would highly recommend that you read through these parts. Discussion explains the results often with everyday language so you can easily read it and grasp the main idea. Implications or significance explains the relevance of the results for society. The conclusion highlights the key findings and major argument again. Some may also mention the limitation of the research and suggestions for future research in this part. Let's sum up what we have just gone through. In the must read column, title, abstract, keywords, introduction, discussion, implications and conclusion. In the column read it when you are interested, literature review. Methodology and findings are being put into the column of no need to read. One more tip, you don't really need to understand every word in the journal. You can choose to skip it when it's too hard to understand. With the techniques that we mentioned today, I'm sure you will find reading academic articles a more enjoyable and worthwhile experience.