Don't think of scholarly articles as novels that you can't skip around. While you want to make sure you're not taking anything out of context, you're on a mission to get information for your topic.
| Title | Scholarly articles will typically have descriptive titles. You can read this from the search results, of course. |
| Abstract | An abstract is a summary of all parts of the article. You may be able to read this from the search results, or look on page 1 of the article. |
| Introduction | This will give you context for the article. What's the general state of knowledge in the field? Why is the author investigating the topic of this article? |
| Results and/or Discussion | If there's original research involved, skip down to where they give their conclusion, the big take-away of their results. |
If yes, then you can finally read through the paper from start to finish. On your first pass, just read to get an overall sense of what's in there. Then read it a second time to make notes and highlights.
Use this to search for keywords in a document if there's one really important and specific keyword you need to find.
Caveat: most pdfs are searchable, but occasionally you might find one that isn't. Try searching for a word from the title to make sure this trick is working. (Also double-check your spelling before writing any articles off!)
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