system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Is there a trick to reading economics papers?

I'm a 2nd year undergraduate of economics. In some of my modules there's a large emphasis on reading academic papers directly from sources such as Economica, Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Review. 

To be honest, I struggle with them. The language seems very difficult and so does the theory. I find myself stuck in a circle - I don't know the theory because I don't really understand the article, and I don't understand the article because I don't know the theory!

Sorry if this type of academic question isn't welcome here. Is there a trick to it? Any advice from successful economists?
gpt
Read the introduction first. Then write down

1. What is the question the author is asking? Why do we care? is the paper primarily pedagogical, or is it answering an applied question, or is it reviewing & synthesizing older results, or is it building a new theoretical model?
2. What is the author's strategy? Is she going to write down a proof? Will she be offering computational simulations? Will there be data and regressions? *These are basically the three methods we have. It's gotta be one.*
3. What are the author's results? Do they answer the question? Is the answer reasonable?

The (question, strategy, results) should, ideally, *exactly* be the first three paragraphs of the paper. Sometimes they aren't, and you have to hunt all through the intro to find them. If you can't find them in the intro, read the conclusion and hunt there.

So write these things down down! Write down in one sentence each, or perhaps two, the question, the strategy, and the results.

Once you have figured out the question, strategy, and results, it's time to tear the paper apart. Do you believe the results? Do they matter?  Do you believe the empirics? If it's a theory paper, are the assumptions reasonable? If it's computational, do you think the model is capturing the features of reality that the author wants to explain?