Introduction
1. Authorship & Collaboration: who was involved in this study? Were the scientists involved in this study working in the same lab at the same institution? If a number of labs or institutions collaborated, in what way may that have been important to the study?
2. What is the specific area of research that this study is about?
3. Is it a hypothesis driven paper or observational/other?
4. Describe the pertinent background information that it is imperative that we know before we can understand the findings of this study.
5. What did you have to research further in order to understand this study and could it have been included in the manuscript?
Methods
1. Describe the main techniques used in the study – think big picture a diagram or table may help
2. What statistical analysis was used?
3. What flaws are there in the methods used in the study? What would you have liked to have also seen?
4. What questions do you still have, what is unclear or excluded?
Results
1. Describe the main findings and overview of the important results, you can use figures from the paper here
2. Discuss the most interesting results and what makes this study impressive
3. Are there errors in their data? Could things have been presented in a better way?
Conclusion/Discussion
1. What conclusions did the authors made from the results?
2. Are the authors mis-representing the significance of the data or are their claims grander than the data presented?
3. What is the next step after this study? What would you love to see them do next?
