how to write article analysis

How to Write an Article Analysis

What Are the Five Parts of an Argumentative Essay?

As you write an article analysis, focus on writing a summary of the main points followed by an analytical critique of the author’s purpose.

Knowing how to write an article analysis paper involves formatting, critical thinking of the literature, a purpose of the article and evaluation of the author’s point of view. In an article analysis critique, you integrate your perspective of the author about a specific topic into a mix of reasoning and arguments. So, you develop an argumentative approach to the point of view of the author. However, a careful distinction occurs between summary and analysis.

When presenting your findings of the article analysis, you might want to summarize the main points, which allows you to formulate a thesis statement. Then, inform the readers about the analytical aspects the author presents in his arguments. Most likely, developing ideas on how to write an article analysis entails a meticulous approach to the critical thinking of the author.

Writing Steps for an Article Analysis

As with any formal paper, you want to begin by quickly reading the article to get the main points. Once you generate a general idea of the point of view of the author, start analyzing the main ideas of each paragraph. An ideal way to take notes based on the reading is to jot them down in the margin of the article. If that's not possible, include notes on your computer or a separate piece of paper. Interact with the text you're reading.

Becoming an active reader helps you decide the relevant information the author intends to communicate. At this point, you might want to include a summary of the main ideas. After you finish writing down the main points, read them to yourself and decide on a concise thesis statement. To do so, begin with the author’s name followed by the title of the article. Next, complete the sentence with your analytical perspective.

Ideally, you want to use outlines, notes and concept mapping to draft your copy. As you progress through the body of the critical part of the paper, include relevant information such as literature references and the author’s purpose for the article. Formal documents, such as an article analysis, also use in-text citation and proofreading. Any academic paper includes a grammar, spelling and mechanics proofreading. Make sure you double-check your paper before submission.

When you write the summary of the article, focus on the purpose of the paper and develop ideas that inform the reader in an unbiased manner. One of the most crucial parts of an analysis essay is the citation of the author and the title of the article. First, introduce the author by first and last name followed by the title of the article. Add variety to your sentence structure by using different formats. For example, you can use “Title,” author’s name, then a brief explanation of the purpose of the piece. Also, many sentences might begin with the author, “Title,” then followed by a description of the main points. By implementing active, explicit verbs into your sentences, you'll show a clear understanding of the material.

Much like any formal paper, consider the most substantial points as your main ideas followed by evidence and facts from the author’s persuasive text. Remember to use transition words to guide your readers in the writing. Those transition phrases or words encourage readers to understand your perspective of the author’s purpose in the article. More importantly, as you write the body of the analysis essay, use the author’s name and article title at the beginning of a paragraph.

When you write your evidence-based arguments, keep the author’s last name throughout the paper. Besides writing your critique of the author’s purpose, remember the audience. The readers relate to your perspective based on what you write. So, use facts and evidence when making inferences about the author’s point of view.

Description of an Article Analysis Essay

When you analyze an article based on the argumentative evidence, generate ideas that support or not the author’s point of view. Although the author’s purpose to communicate the intentions of the article may be clear, you need to evaluate the reasons for writing the piece. Since the basis of your analysis consists of argumentative evidence, elaborate a concise and clear thesis. However, don't rely on the thesis to stay the same as you research the article.

At many times, you'll find that you'll change your argument when you see new facts. In this way, you might want to use text, reader, author, context and exigence approaches. You don't need elaborate ideas. Just use the author’s text so that the reader understands the point of views. However, evaluate the strong tone of the author and the validity of the claims in the article. So, use the context of the article.

Then, ask yourself if the author explains the purpose of his or her persuasive reasons. As you discern the facts and evidence of the article, analyze the point of views carefully. Look for assumptions without basis and biased ideas that aren't valid. An analysis example paragraph easily includes your perspective of the author’s purpose and whether you agree or not. Don't be surprised if your critique changes as you research other authors about the article.

Consequently, your response might end up agreeing, disagreeing or being somewhat in between despite your efforts of finding supporting evidence. Regardless of the consequences of your research of the literature and the perspective of the author’s point of view, maintain a definite purpose in writing. Don't fluctuate from agreement and disagreement. Focusing your analysis on presenting the points of view of the author so readers understand it and disseminating that critique is the basis of your paper.

When reading the text carefully, analyze the main points and explain the reasons of the author. Also, as you describe the document, offer evidence and facts to eliminate any biases. In an argumentative analysis, the focus of the writer can quickly shift. Avoid ineffective ways of approaching the author’s point of view that make the writing vague and lack supporting evidence. A clear way to stay away from biases is to use quotes from the author. However, using excessive amounts of quotes is counterproductive. Use author quotes sparingly.

As you develop your own ideas about the author’s viewpoints, use deductive reasoning to analyze the various aspects of the article. Often, you'll find the historical background influenced the author or persuaded the author to challenge the ideals of the time. Distinguishing between writing a summary and an analysis paper is crucial to your essay. You might find that using a review at the beginning of your article indicates a clear perspective to your analysis. Hence, a summary explains the main points of a paper in a concise manner.

You condense the original text, describe the main points, write your thesis and form no opinion about the article. On the other hand, an analysis is the breakdown of the author’s arguments that you use to derive the purpose of the author. When analyzing an article, you're dissecting the main points to draw conclusions about the persuasive ideas of the author. Furthermore, you offer argumentative evidence, strengths and weaknesses of the main points. More importantly, you don't give your opinion. Rather than providing comments on the author’s point of views, you compile evidence of how the author persuades readers to think about a particular topic and whether the author elaborates it adequately.

Examples of an Article Analysis

A summary and analysis essay example illustrates the arguments the author makes and how those claims are valid. For instance, a sample article analysis of “Sex, Lies, and Conversation; Why Is It So Hard for Men and Women to Talk to Each Other” by Deborah Tannen begins with a summary of the main critical points followed by an analytical perspective. One of the precise ways to summarize is to focus on the main ideas that Tannen uses to distinguish between men and women.

The writer of the summary also clearly states how one idea correlates to the other without presenting biases or opinions. Also, the writer doesn't take any sides on whether men or women are to blame for miscommunication. Instead, the summary points to the communication differences between men and women. In the analytical section of the sample, the writer immediately takes a transparent approach to the article and the author. The analysis shows apparent examples from the article with quotes and refers back to the article connecting miscommunication with misinterpretation. Finally, the writer poses various questions that Tannen didn't address, such as strategies for effective communication. However, the writer gives the reader the purpose of Tannen’s article and the reasons the author wrote it.

Another example of an article analysis is “The Year That Changed Everything” by Lance Morrow. The writer presents a concise summary of the elected government positions of Nixon, Kennedy and Johnson. Furthermore, the writer distinguishes between the three elected men's positions and discusses the similarities. The summary tends to lean toward a more powerful tone but effectively explains the author’s point of view for each one of these men. Then, the writer further describes the ideals of the period between morality and immoral values. The analytical aspect of the sample shows the reader the author’s powerful message.

The writer immediately lets the reader know about the persuasive nature of the article and the relevance of the time. For instance, the writer shows the reader in various parts of the article by suggesting examples in specific paragraph numbers. The writer also makes a powerful impact with the use of quotes embedded into the text. The writer uses transition words and active verbs, such as more examples, links, uncovering and secrets, and backs this claim up to describe Morrow’s purpose for the article. The analysis has the audience in mind.

The writer points out the specific details of the time era that only people of the time would relate. More importantly, the writer analyzes Morrow’s ideas as critical to formulating an opinion about Nixon, Kennedy and Johnson. However, the writer points out the assumptions Morrow makes between personal lifestyle and how it affects the political arena. Moreover, the writer suggests that Morrow’s claims aren't entirely valid just because the author mentions historical events. Unlike Tannen’s analytical example, the writer lets the readers know the misconnection between moral value and the lifestyle of many people at the time.

Both article analyses show a clear way to present different persuasive points of view. Unlike a summary, an analysis approach offers the reader an explicit representation of the author’s viewpoints without any opinions. The writers of each sample focus on providing evidence, facts and reasonable statements. Consequently, each example demonstrates the proper use of the critical analysis of the literature and evaluates the purpose of the author. Without seeking an agreement or not, the writer clearly distinguishes between a summary and an analysis of each article.

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Barbara earned a B. S. in Biochemistry and Chemistry from the Univ. of Houston and the Univ. of Central Florida, respectively. Besides working as a chemist for the pharmaceutical and water industry, she pursued her degree in secondary science teaching. Barbara now writes and researches educational content for blogs and higher-ed sites.

Organizing Your Social Sciences Research Assignments

• Annotated Bibliography
• Analyzing a Scholarly Journal Article
• Group Presentations
• Dealing with Nervousness
• Using Visual Aids
• Grading Someone Else's Paper
• Types of Structured Group Activities
• Group Project Survival Skills
• Leading a Class Discussion
• Multiple Book Review Essay
• Reviewing Collected Works
• Writing a Case Analysis Paper
• Writing a Case Study
• About Informed Consent
• Writing Field Notes
• Writing a Policy Memo
• Writing a Reflective Paper
• Writing a Research Proposal
• Generative AI and Writing
• Acknowledgments

Definition and Introduction

Journal article analysis assignments require you to summarize and critically assess the quality of an empirical research study published in a scholarly [a.k.a., academic, peer-reviewed] journal. The article may be assigned by the professor, chosen from course readings listed in the syllabus, or you must locate an article on your own, usually with the requirement that you search using a reputable library database, such as, JSTOR or ProQuest . The article chosen is expected to relate to the overall discipline of the course, specific course content, or key concepts discussed in class. In some cases, the purpose of the assignment is to analyze an article that is part of the literature review for a future research project.

Analysis of an article can be assigned to students individually or as part of a small group project. The final product is usually in the form of a short paper [typically 1- 6 double-spaced pages] that addresses key questions the professor uses to guide your analysis or that assesses specific parts of a scholarly research study [e.g., the research problem, methodology, discussion, conclusions or findings]. The analysis paper may be shared on a digital course management platform and/or presented to the class for the purpose of promoting a wider discussion about the topic of the study. Although assigned in any level of undergraduate and graduate coursework in the social and behavioral sciences, professors frequently include this assignment in upper division courses to help students learn how to effectively identify, read, and analyze empirical research within their major.

Franco, Josue. “Introducing the Analysis of Journal Articles.” Prepared for presentation at the American Political Science Association’s 2020 Teaching and Learning Conference, February 7-9, 2020, Albuquerque, New Mexico; Sego, Sandra A. and Anne E. Stuart. "Learning to Read Empirical Articles in General Psychology." Teaching of Psychology 43 (2016): 38-42; Kershaw, Trina C., Jordan P. Lippman, and Jennifer Fugate. "Practice Makes Proficient: Teaching Undergraduate Students to Understand Published Research." Instructional Science 46 (2018): 921-946; Woodward-Kron, Robyn. "Critical Analysis and the Journal Article Review Assignment." Prospect 18 (August 2003): 20-36; MacMillan, Margy and Allison MacKenzie. "Strategies for Integrating Information Literacy and Academic Literacy: Helping Undergraduate Students make the most of Scholarly Articles." Library Management 33 (2012): 525-535.

Benefits of Journal Article Analysis Assignments

Analyzing and synthesizing a scholarly journal article is intended to help students obtain the reading and critical thinking skills needed to develop and write their own research papers. This assignment also supports workplace skills where you could be asked to summarize a report or other type of document and report it, for example, during a staff meeting or for a presentation.

There are two broadly defined ways that analyzing a scholarly journal article supports student learning:

Improve Reading Skills

Conducting research requires an ability to review, evaluate, and synthesize prior research studies. Reading prior research requires an understanding of the academic writing style , the type of epistemological beliefs or practices underpinning the research design, and the specific vocabulary and technical terminology [i.e., jargon] used within a discipline. Reading scholarly articles is important because academic writing is unfamiliar to most students; they have had limited exposure to using peer-reviewed journal articles prior to entering college or students have yet to gain exposure to the specific academic writing style of their disciplinary major. Learning how to read scholarly articles also requires careful and deliberate concentration on how authors use specific language and phrasing to convey their research, the problem it addresses, its relationship to prior research, its significance, its limitations, and how authors connect methods of data gathering to the results so as to develop recommended solutions derived from the overall research process.

Improve Comprehension Skills

In addition to knowing how to read scholarly journals articles, students must learn how to effectively interpret what the scholar(s) are trying to convey. Academic writing can be dense, multi-layered, and non-linear in how information is presented. In addition, scholarly articles contain footnotes or endnotes, references to sources, multiple appendices, and, in some cases, non-textual elements [e.g., graphs, charts] that can break-up the reader’s experience with the narrative flow of the study. Analyzing articles helps students practice comprehending these elements of writing, critiquing the arguments being made, reflecting upon the significance of the research, and how it relates to building new knowledge and understanding or applying new approaches to practice. Comprehending scholarly writing also involves thinking critically about where you fit within the overall dialogue among scholars concerning the research problem, finding possible gaps in the research that require further analysis, or identifying where the author(s) has failed to examine fully any specific elements of the study.

In addition, journal article analysis assignments are used by professors to strengthen discipline-specific information literacy skills, either alone or in relation to other tasks, such as, giving a class presentation or participating in a group project. These benefits can include the ability to:

• Effectively paraphrase text, which leads to a more thorough understanding of the overall study;
• Identify and describe strengths and weaknesses of the study and their implications;
• Relate the article to other course readings and in relation to particular research concepts or ideas discussed during class;
• Think critically about the research and summarize complex ideas contained within;
• Plan, organize, and write an effective inquiry-based paper that investigates a research study, evaluates evidence, expounds on the author’s main ideas, and presents an argument concerning the significance and impact of the research in a clear and concise manner;
• Model the type of source summary and critique you should do for any college-level research paper; and,
• Increase interest and engagement with the research problem of the study as well as with the discipline.

Kershaw, Trina C., Jennifer Fugate, and Aminda J. O'Hare. "Teaching Undergraduates to Understand Published Research through Structured Practice in Identifying Key Research Concepts." Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology . Advance online publication, 2020; Franco, Josue. “Introducing the Analysis of Journal Articles.” Prepared for presentation at the American Political Science Association’s 2020 Teaching and Learning Conference, February 7-9, 2020, Albuquerque, New Mexico; Sego, Sandra A. and Anne E. Stuart. "Learning to Read Empirical Articles in General Psychology." Teaching of Psychology 43 (2016): 38-42; Woodward-Kron, Robyn. "Critical Analysis and the Journal Article Review Assignment." Prospect 18 (August 2003): 20-36; MacMillan, Margy and Allison MacKenzie. "Strategies for Integrating Information Literacy and Academic Literacy: Helping Undergraduate Students make the most of Scholarly Articles." Library Management 33 (2012): 525-535; Kershaw, Trina C., Jordan P. Lippman, and Jennifer Fugate. "Practice Makes Proficient: Teaching Undergraduate Students to Understand Published Research." Instructional Science 46 (2018): 921-946.

Structure and Organization

A journal article analysis paper should be written in paragraph format and include an instruction to the study, your analysis of the research, and a conclusion that provides an overall assessment of the author's work, along with an explanation of what you believe is the study's overall impact and significance. Unless the purpose of the assignment is to examine foundational studies published many years ago, you should select articles that have been published relatively recently [e.g., within the past few years].

Since the research has been completed, reference to the study in your paper should be written in the past tense, with your analysis stated in the present tense [e.g., “The author portrayed access to health care services in rural areas as primarily a problem of having reliable transportation. However, I believe the author is overgeneralizing this issue because...”].

Introduction Section

The first section of a journal analysis paper should describe the topic of the article and highlight the author’s main points. This includes describing the research problem and theoretical framework, the rationale for the research, the methods of data gathering and analysis, the key findings, and the author’s final conclusions and recommendations. The narrative should focus on the act of describing rather than analyzing. Think of the introduction as a more comprehensive and detailed descriptive abstract of the study.

Possible questions to help guide your writing of the introduction section may include:

• Who are the authors and what credentials do they hold that contributes to the validity of the study?
• What was the research problem being investigated?
• What type of research design was used to investigate the research problem?
• What theoretical idea(s) and/or research questions were used to address the problem?
• What was the source of the data or information used as evidence for analysis?
• What methods were applied to investigate this evidence?
• What were the author's overall conclusions and key findings?

Critical Analysis Section

The second section of a journal analysis paper should describe the strengths and weaknesses of the study and analyze its significance and impact. This section is where you shift the narrative from describing to analyzing. Think critically about the research in relation to other course readings, what has been discussed in class, or based on your own life experiences. If you are struggling to identify any weaknesses, explain why you believe this to be true. However, no study is perfect, regardless of how laudable its design may be. Given this, think about the repercussions of the choices made by the author(s) and how you might have conducted the study differently. Examples can include contemplating the choice of what sources were included or excluded in support of examining the research problem, the choice of the method used to analyze the data, or the choice to highlight specific recommended courses of action and/or implications for practice over others. Another strategy is to place yourself within the research study itself by thinking reflectively about what may be missing if you had been a participant in the study or if the recommended courses of action specifically targeted you or your community.

Possible questions to help guide your writing of the analysis section may include:

Introduction

• Did the author clearly state the problem being investigated?
• What was your reaction to and perspective on the research problem?
• Was the study’s objective clearly stated? Did the author clearly explain why the study was necessary?
• How well did the introduction frame the scope of the study?
• Did the introduction conclude with a clear purpose statement?

Literature Review

• Did the literature review lay a foundation for understanding the significance of the research problem?
• Did the literature review provide enough background information to understand the problem in relation to relevant contexts [e.g., historical, economic, social, cultural, etc.].
• Did literature review effectively place the study within the domain of prior research? Is anything missing?
• Was the literature review organized by conceptual categories or did the author simply list and describe sources?
• Did the author accurately explain how the data or information were collected?
• Was the data used sufficient in supporting the study of the research problem?
• Was there another methodological approach that could have been more illuminating?
• Give your overall evaluation of the methods used in this article. How much trust would you put in generating relevant findings?

Results and Discussion

• Were the results clearly presented?
• Did you feel that the results support the theoretical and interpretive claims of the author? Why?
• What did the author(s) do especially well in describing or analyzing their results?
• Was the author's evaluation of the findings clearly stated?
• How well did the discussion of the results relate to what is already known about the research problem?
• Was the discussion of the results free of repetition and redundancies?
• What interpretations did the authors make that you think are in incomplete, unwarranted, or overstated?
• Did the conclusion effectively capture the main points of study?
• Did the conclusion address the research questions posed? Do they seem reasonable?
• Were the author’s conclusions consistent with the evidence and arguments presented?
• Has the author explained how the research added new knowledge or understanding?

Overall Writing Style

• If the article included tables, figures, or other non-textual elements, did they contribute to understanding the study?
• Were ideas developed and related in a logical sequence?
• Were transitions between sections of the article smooth and easy to follow?

Overall Evaluation Section

The final section of a journal analysis paper should bring your thoughts together into a coherent assessment of the value of the research study . This section is where the narrative flow transitions from analyzing specific elements of the article to critically evaluating the overall study. Explain what you view as the significance of the research in relation to the overall course content and any relevant discussions that occurred during class. Think about how the article contributes to understanding the overall research problem, how it fits within existing literature on the topic, how it relates to the course, and what it means to you as a student researcher. In some cases, your professor will also ask you to describe your experiences writing the journal article analysis paper as part of a reflective learning exercise.

Possible questions to help guide your writing of the conclusion and evaluation section may include:

• Was the structure of the article clear and well organized?
• Was the topic of current or enduring interest to you?
• What were the main weaknesses of the article? [this does not refer to limitations stated by the author, but what you believe are potential flaws]
• Was any of the information in the article unclear or ambiguous?
• What did you learn from the research? If nothing stood out to you, explain why.
• Assess the originality of the research. Did you believe it contributed new understanding of the research problem?
• Were you persuaded by the author’s arguments?
• If the author made any final recommendations, will they be impactful if applied to practice?
• In what ways could future research build off of this study?
• What implications does the study have for daily life?
• Was the use of non-textual elements, footnotes or endnotes, and/or appendices helpful in understanding the research?
• What lingering questions do you have after analyzing the article?

NOTE: Avoid using quotes. One of the main purposes of writing an article analysis paper is to learn how to effectively paraphrase and use your own words to summarize a scholarly research study and to explain what the research means to you. Using and citing a direct quote from the article should only be done to help emphasize a key point or to underscore an important concept or idea.

Business: The Article Analysis . Fred Meijer Center for Writing, Grand Valley State University; Bachiochi, Peter et al. "Using Empirical Article Analysis to Assess Research Methods Courses." Teaching of Psychology 38 (2011): 5-9; Brosowsky, Nicholaus P. et al. “Teaching Undergraduate Students to Read Empirical Articles: An Evaluation and Revision of the QALMRI Method.” PsyArXi Preprints , 2020; Holster, Kristin. “Article Evaluation Assignment”. TRAILS: Teaching Resources and Innovations Library for Sociology . Washington DC: American Sociological Association, 2016; Kershaw, Trina C., Jennifer Fugate, and Aminda J. O'Hare. "Teaching Undergraduates to Understand Published Research through Structured Practice in Identifying Key Research Concepts." Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology . Advance online publication, 2020; Franco, Josue. “Introducing the Analysis of Journal Articles.” Prepared for presentation at the American Political Science Association’s 2020 Teaching and Learning Conference, February 7-9, 2020, Albuquerque, New Mexico; Reviewer's Guide . SAGE Reviewer Gateway, SAGE Journals; Sego, Sandra A. and Anne E. Stuart. "Learning to Read Empirical Articles in General Psychology." Teaching of Psychology 43 (2016): 38-42; Kershaw, Trina C., Jordan P. Lippman, and Jennifer Fugate. "Practice Makes Proficient: Teaching Undergraduate Students to Understand Published Research." Instructional Science 46 (2018): 921-946; Gyuris, Emma, and Laura Castell. "To Tell Them or Show Them? How to Improve Science Students’ Skills of Critical Reading." International Journal of Innovation in Science and Mathematics Education 21 (2013): 70-80; Woodward-Kron, Robyn. "Critical Analysis and the Journal Article Review Assignment." Prospect 18 (August 2003): 20-36; MacMillan, Margy and Allison MacKenzie. "Strategies for Integrating Information Literacy and Academic Literacy: Helping Undergraduate Students Make the Most of Scholarly Articles." Library Management 33 (2012): 525-535.

Writing Tip

Not All Scholarly Journal Articles Can Be Critically Analyzed

There are a variety of articles published in scholarly journals that do not fit within the guidelines of an article analysis assignment. This is because the work cannot be empirically examined or it does not generate new knowledge in a way which can be critically analyzed.

If you are required to locate a research study on your own, avoid selecting these types of journal articles:

• Theoretical essays which discuss concepts, assumptions, and propositions, but report no empirical research;
• Statistical or methodological papers that may analyze data, but the bulk of the work is devoted to refining a new measurement, statistical technique, or modeling procedure;
• Articles that review, analyze, critique, and synthesize prior research, but do not report any original research;
• Brief essays devoted to research methods and findings;
• Articles written by scholars in popular magazines or industry trade journals;
• Pre-print articles that have been posted online, but may undergo further editing and revision by the journal's editorial staff before final publication; and
• Academic commentary that discusses research trends or emerging concepts and ideas, but does not contain citations to sources.

Journal Analysis Assignment - Myers . Writing@CSU, Colorado State University; Franco, Josue. “Introducing the Analysis of Journal Articles.” Prepared for presentation at the American Political Science Association’s 2020 Teaching and Learning Conference, February 7-9, 2020, Albuquerque, New Mexico; Woodward-Kron, Robyn. "Critical Analysis and the Journal Article Review Assignment." Prospect 18 (August 2003): 20-36.

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How to Write an Analysis

Last Updated: April 3, 2024 Fact Checked

This article was co-authored by Christopher Taylor, PhD and by wikiHow staff writer, Megaera Lorenz, PhD . Christopher Taylor is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of English at Austin Community College in Texas. He received his PhD in English Literature and Medieval Studies from the University of Texas at Austin in 2014. There are 14 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources. This article has been viewed 289,427 times.

An analysis is a piece of writing that looks at some aspect of a document in detail. To write a good analysis, you’ll need to ask yourself questions that focus on how and why the document works the way it does. You can start the process by gathering information about the subject of your analysis and defining the questions your analysis will answer. Once you’ve outlined your main arguments, look for specific evidence to support them. You can then work on putting your analysis together into a coherent piece of writing.

Gathering Information and Building Your Argument

• If your analysis is supposed to answer a specific question or focus on a particular aspect of the document you are analyzing.
• If there are any length or formatting requirements for the analysis.
• The citation style your instructor wants you to use.
• On what criteria your instructor will evaluate your analysis (e.g., organization, originality, good use of references and quotations, or correct spelling and grammar).

• The title of the document (if it has one).
• The name of the creator of the document. For example, depending on the type of document you’re working with, this could be the author, artist, director, performer, or photographer.
• The form and medium of the document (e.g., “Painting, oil on canvas”).
• When and where the document was created.
• The historical and cultural context of the work.

• Who you believe the intended audience is for the advertisement.
• What rhetorical choices the author made to persuade the audience of their main point.
• What product is being advertised.
• How the poster uses images to make the product look appealing.
• Whether there is any text in the poster, and, if so, how it works together with the images to reinforce the message of the ad.
• What the purpose of the ad is or what its main point is.

• For example, if you’re analyzing an advertisement poster, you might focus on the question: “How does this poster use colors to symbolize the problem that the product is intended to fix? Does it also use color to represent the beneficial results of using the product?”

• For example, you might write, “This poster uses the color red to symbolize the pain of a headache. The blue elements in the design represent the relief brought by the product.”
• You could develop the argument further by saying, “The colors used in the text reinforce the use of colors in the graphic elements of the poster, helping the viewer make a direct connection between the words and images.”

• For example, if you’re arguing that the advertisement poster uses red to represent pain, you might point out that the figure of the headache sufferer is red, while everyone around them is blue. Another piece of evidence might be the use of red lettering for the words “HEADACHE” and “PAIN” in the text of the poster.
• You could also draw on outside evidence to support your claims. For example, you might point out that in the country where the advertisement was produced, the color red is often symbolically associated with warnings or danger.

Tip: If you’re analyzing a text, make sure to properly cite any quotations that you use to support your arguments. Put any direct quotations in quotation marks (“”) and be sure to give location information, such as the page number where the quote appears. Additionally, follow the citation requirements for the style guide assigned by your instructor or one that's commonly used for the subject matter you're writing about.

Organizing and Drafting Your Analysis

• For example, “The poster ‘Say! What a relief,’ created in 1932 by designer Dorothy Plotzky, uses contrasting colors to symbolize the pain of a headache and the relief brought by Miss Burnham’s Pep-Em-Up Pills. The red elements denote pain, while blue ones indicate soothing relief.”

Tip: Your instructor might have specific directions about which information to include in your thesis statement (e.g., the title, author, and date of the document you are analyzing). If you’re not sure how to format your thesis statement or topic sentence, don’t hesitate to ask.

• a. Background
• ii. Analysis/Explanation
• iii. Example
• iv. Analysis/Explanation
• III. Conclusion

• For example, “In the late 1920s, Kansas City schoolteacher Ethel Burnham developed a patent headache medication that quickly achieved commercial success throughout the American Midwest. The popularity of the medicine was largely due to a series of simple but eye-catching advertising posters that were created over the next decade. The poster ‘Say! What a relief,’ created in 1932 by designer Dorothy Plotzky, uses contrasting colors to symbolize the pain of a headache and the relief brought by Miss Burnham’s Pep-Em-Up Pills.”

• Make sure to include clear transitions between each argument and each paragraph. Use transitional words and phrases, such as “Furthermore,” “Additionally,” “For example,” “Likewise,” or “In contrast . . .”
• The best way to organize your arguments will vary based on the individual topic and the specific points you are trying to make. For example, in your analysis of the poster, you might start with arguments about the red visual elements and then move on to a discussion about how the red text fits in.

• For example, you might end your essay with a few sentences about how other advertisements at the time might have been influenced by Dorothy Plotzky’s use of colors.

• For example, in your discussion of the advertisement, avoid stating that you think the art is “beautiful” or that the advertisement is “boring.” Instead, focus on what the poster was supposed to accomplish and how the designer attempted to achieve those goals.

Polishing Your Analysis

• For example, if your essay currently skips around between discussions of the red and blue elements of the poster, consider reorganizing it so that you discuss all the red elements first, then focus on the blue ones.

• For example, you might look for places where you could provide additional examples to support one of your major arguments.

• For example, if you included a paragraph about Dorothy Plotzky’s previous work as a children’s book illustrator, you may want to cut it if it doesn’t somehow relate to her use of color in advertising.
• Cutting material out of your analysis may be difficult, especially if you put a lot of thought into each sentence or found the additional material really interesting. Your analysis will be stronger if you keep it concise and to the point, however.

• You may find it helpful to have someone else go over your essay and look for any mistakes you might have missed.

Tip: When you’re reading silently, it’s easy to miss typos and other small errors because your brain corrects them automatically. Reading your work out loud can make problems easier to spot.

Sample Analysis Outline and Conclusion

Expert Q&A

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• ↑ https://lsa.umich.edu/sweetland/undergraduates/writing-guides/how-do-i-make-sure-i-understand-an-assignment-.html
• ↑ https://www.bucks.edu/media/bcccmedialibrary/pdf/HOWTOWRITEALITERARYANALYSISESSAY_10.15.07_001.pdf
• ↑ https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/visual_rhetoric/analyzing_visual_documents/elements_of_analysis.html
• ↑ https://lsa.umich.edu/sweetland/undergraduates/writing-guides/how-can-i-create-stronger-analysis-.html
• ↑ https://lsa.umich.edu/sweetland/undergraduates/writing-guides/how-do-i-decide-what-i-should-argue-.html
• ↑ https://lsa.umich.edu/sweetland/undergraduates/writing-guides/how-do-i-effectively-integrate-textual-evidence-.html
• ↑ https://writingcenter.uagc.edu/writing-a-thesis
• ↑ https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/visual_rhetoric/analyzing_visual_documents/organizing_your_analysis.html
• ↑ https://lsa.umich.edu/sweetland/undergraduates/writing-guides/how-do-i-write-an-intro--conclusion----body-paragraph.html
• ↑ http://utminers.utep.edu/omwilliamson/engl0310/Textanalysis.htm
• ↑ https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/graduate_writing/graduate_writing_topics/graduate_writing_organization_structure_new.html
• ↑ https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/mechanics/sentence_clarity.html
• ↑ https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/conciseness-handout/
• ↑ https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/editing-and-proofreading/

About This Article

If you need to write an analysis, first look closely at your assignment to make sure you understand the requirements. Then, gather background information about the document you’ll be analyzing and do a close read so that you’re thoroughly familiar with the subject matter. If it’s not already specified in your assignment, come up with one or more specific question’s you’d like your analysis to answer, then outline your main arguments. Finally, gather evidence and examples to support your arguments. Read on to learn how to organize, draft, and polish your analysis! Did this summary help you? Yes No

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Home » Critical Analysis – Types, Examples and Writing Guide

Critical Analysis – Types, Examples and Writing Guide

Table of Contents

Critical Analysis

Definition:

Critical analysis is a process of examining a piece of work or an idea in a systematic, objective, and analytical way. It involves breaking down complex ideas, concepts, or arguments into smaller, more manageable parts to understand them better.

Types of Critical Analysis

Types of Critical Analysis are as follows:

Literary Analysis

This type of analysis focuses on analyzing and interpreting works of literature , such as novels, poetry, plays, etc. The analysis involves examining the literary devices used in the work, such as symbolism, imagery, and metaphor, and how they contribute to the overall meaning of the work.

Film Analysis

This type of analysis involves examining and interpreting films, including their themes, cinematography, editing, and sound. Film analysis can also include evaluating the director’s style and how it contributes to the overall message of the film.

Art Analysis

This type of analysis involves examining and interpreting works of art , such as paintings, sculptures, and installations. The analysis involves examining the elements of the artwork, such as color, composition, and technique, and how they contribute to the overall meaning of the work.

Cultural Analysis

This type of analysis involves examining and interpreting cultural artifacts , such as advertisements, popular music, and social media posts. The analysis involves examining the cultural context of the artifact and how it reflects and shapes cultural values, beliefs, and norms.

Historical Analysis

This type of analysis involves examining and interpreting historical documents , such as diaries, letters, and government records. The analysis involves examining the historical context of the document and how it reflects the social, political, and cultural attitudes of the time.

Philosophical Analysis

This type of analysis involves examining and interpreting philosophical texts and ideas, such as the works of philosophers and their arguments. The analysis involves evaluating the logical consistency of the arguments and assessing the validity and soundness of the conclusions.

Scientific Analysis

This type of analysis involves examining and interpreting scientific research studies and their findings. The analysis involves evaluating the methods used in the study, the data collected, and the conclusions drawn, and assessing their reliability and validity.

Critical Discourse Analysis

This type of analysis involves examining and interpreting language use in social and political contexts. The analysis involves evaluating the power dynamics and social relationships conveyed through language use and how they shape discourse and social reality.

Comparative Analysis

This type of analysis involves examining and interpreting multiple texts or works of art and comparing them to each other. The analysis involves evaluating the similarities and differences between the texts and how they contribute to understanding the themes and meanings conveyed.

Critical Analysis Format

Critical Analysis Format is as follows:

I. Introduction

• Provide a brief overview of the text, object, or event being analyzed
• Explain the purpose of the analysis and its significance
• Provide background information on the context and relevant historical or cultural factors

II. Description

• Provide a detailed description of the text, object, or event being analyzed
• Identify key themes, ideas, and arguments presented
• Describe the author or creator’s style, tone, and use of language or visual elements

III. Analysis

• Analyze the text, object, or event using critical thinking skills
• Identify the main strengths and weaknesses of the argument or presentation
• Evaluate the reliability and validity of the evidence presented
• Assess any assumptions or biases that may be present in the text, object, or event
• Consider the implications of the argument or presentation for different audiences and contexts

IV. Evaluation

• Provide an overall evaluation of the text, object, or event based on the analysis
• Assess the effectiveness of the argument or presentation in achieving its intended purpose
• Identify any limitations or gaps in the argument or presentation
• Consider any alternative viewpoints or interpretations that could be presented
• Summarize the main points of the analysis and evaluation
• Reiterate the significance of the text, object, or event and its relevance to broader issues or debates
• Provide any recommendations for further research or future developments in the field.

VI. Example

• Provide an example or two to support your analysis and evaluation
• Use quotes or specific details from the text, object, or event to support your claims
• Analyze the example(s) using critical thinking skills and explain how they relate to your overall argument

VII. Conclusion

• Reiterate your thesis statement and summarize your main points
• Provide a final evaluation of the text, object, or event based on your analysis
• Offer recommendations for future research or further developments in the field
• End with a thought-provoking statement or question that encourages the reader to think more deeply about the topic

How to Write Critical Analysis

Writing a critical analysis involves evaluating and interpreting a text, such as a book, article, or film, and expressing your opinion about its quality and significance. Here are some steps you can follow to write a critical analysis:

• Read and re-read the text: Before you begin writing, make sure you have a good understanding of the text. Read it several times and take notes on the key points, themes, and arguments.
• Identify the author’s purpose and audience: Consider why the author wrote the text and who the intended audience is. This can help you evaluate whether the author achieved their goals and whether the text is effective in reaching its audience.
• Analyze the structure and style: Look at the organization of the text and the author’s writing style. Consider how these elements contribute to the overall meaning of the text.
• Evaluate the content : Analyze the author’s arguments, evidence, and conclusions. Consider whether they are logical, convincing, and supported by the evidence presented in the text.
• Consider the context: Think about the historical, cultural, and social context in which the text was written. This can help you understand the author’s perspective and the significance of the text.
• Develop your thesis statement : Based on your analysis, develop a clear and concise thesis statement that summarizes your overall evaluation of the text.
• Support your thesis: Use evidence from the text to support your thesis statement. This can include direct quotes, paraphrases, and examples from the text.
• Write the introduction, body, and conclusion : Organize your analysis into an introduction that provides context and presents your thesis, a body that presents your evidence and analysis, and a conclusion that summarizes your main points and restates your thesis.
• Revise and edit: After you have written your analysis, revise and edit it to ensure that your writing is clear, concise, and well-organized. Check for spelling and grammar errors, and make sure that your analysis is logically sound and supported by evidence.

When to Write Critical Analysis

You may want to write a critical analysis in the following situations:

• Academic Assignments: If you are a student, you may be assigned to write a critical analysis as a part of your coursework. This could include analyzing a piece of literature, a historical event, or a scientific paper.
• Journalism and Media: As a journalist or media person, you may need to write a critical analysis of current events, political speeches, or media coverage.
• Personal Interest: If you are interested in a particular topic, you may want to write a critical analysis to gain a deeper understanding of it. For example, you may want to analyze the themes and motifs in a novel or film that you enjoyed.
• Professional Development : Professionals such as writers, scholars, and researchers often write critical analyses to gain insights into their field of study or work.

Critical Analysis Example

An Example of Critical Analysis Could be as follow:

Research Topic:

The Impact of Online Learning on Student Performance

Introduction:

The introduction of the research topic is clear and provides an overview of the issue. However, it could benefit from providing more background information on the prevalence of online learning and its potential impact on student performance.

Literature Review:

The literature review is comprehensive and well-structured. It covers a broad range of studies that have examined the relationship between online learning and student performance. However, it could benefit from including more recent studies and providing a more critical analysis of the existing literature.

Research Methods:

The research methods are clearly described and appropriate for the research question. The study uses a quasi-experimental design to compare the performance of students who took an online course with those who took the same course in a traditional classroom setting. However, the study may benefit from using a randomized controlled trial design to reduce potential confounding factors.

The results are presented in a clear and concise manner. The study finds that students who took the online course performed similarly to those who took the traditional course. However, the study only measures performance on one course and may not be generalizable to other courses or contexts.

Discussion :

The discussion section provides a thorough analysis of the study’s findings. The authors acknowledge the limitations of the study and provide suggestions for future research. However, they could benefit from discussing potential mechanisms underlying the relationship between online learning and student performance.

Conclusion :

The conclusion summarizes the main findings of the study and provides some implications for future research and practice. However, it could benefit from providing more specific recommendations for implementing online learning programs in educational settings.

Purpose of Critical Analysis

There are several purposes of critical analysis, including:

• To identify and evaluate arguments : Critical analysis helps to identify the main arguments in a piece of writing or speech and evaluate their strengths and weaknesses. This enables the reader to form their own opinion and make informed decisions.
• To assess evidence : Critical analysis involves examining the evidence presented in a text or speech and evaluating its quality and relevance to the argument. This helps to determine the credibility of the claims being made.
• To recognize biases and assumptions : Critical analysis helps to identify any biases or assumptions that may be present in the argument, and evaluate how these affect the credibility of the argument.
• To develop critical thinking skills: Critical analysis helps to develop the ability to think critically, evaluate information objectively, and make reasoned judgments based on evidence.
• To improve communication skills: Critical analysis involves carefully reading and listening to information, evaluating it, and expressing one’s own opinion in a clear and concise manner. This helps to improve communication skills and the ability to express ideas effectively.

Importance of Critical Analysis

Here are some specific reasons why critical analysis is important:

• Helps to identify biases: Critical analysis helps individuals to recognize their own biases and assumptions, as well as the biases of others. By being aware of biases, individuals can better evaluate the credibility and reliability of information.
• Enhances problem-solving skills : Critical analysis encourages individuals to question assumptions and consider multiple perspectives, which can lead to creative problem-solving and innovation.
• Promotes better decision-making: By carefully evaluating evidence and arguments, critical analysis can help individuals make more informed and effective decisions.
• Facilitates understanding: Critical analysis helps individuals to understand complex issues and ideas by breaking them down into smaller parts and evaluating them separately.
• Fosters intellectual growth : Engaging in critical analysis challenges individuals to think deeply and critically, which can lead to intellectual growth and development.

Advantages of Critical Analysis

Some advantages of critical analysis include:

• Improved decision-making: Critical analysis helps individuals make informed decisions by evaluating all available information and considering various perspectives.
• Enhanced problem-solving skills : Critical analysis requires individuals to identify and analyze the root cause of a problem, which can help develop effective solutions.
• Increased creativity : Critical analysis encourages individuals to think outside the box and consider alternative solutions to problems, which can lead to more creative and innovative ideas.
• Improved communication : Critical analysis helps individuals communicate their ideas and opinions more effectively by providing logical and coherent arguments.
• Reduced bias: Critical analysis requires individuals to evaluate information objectively, which can help reduce personal biases and subjective opinions.
• Better understanding of complex issues : Critical analysis helps individuals to understand complex issues by breaking them down into smaller parts, examining each part and understanding how they fit together.
• Greater self-awareness: Critical analysis helps individuals to recognize their own biases, assumptions, and limitations, which can lead to personal growth and development.

About the author

Muhammad Hassan

Researcher, Academic Writer, Web developer

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• A Research Guide
• Writing Guide
• Article Writing

How to Analyze an Article

• What is an article analysis
• Outline and structure
• Step-by-step writing guide
• Article analysis format
• Analysis examples
• Article analysis template

What Is an Article Analysis?

• Summarize the main points in the piece – when you get to do an article analysis, you have to analyze the main points so that the reader can understand what the article is all about in general. The summary will be an overview of the story outline, but it is not the main analysis. It just acts to guide the reader to understand what the article is all about in brief.
• Proceed to the main argument and analyze the evidence offered by the writer in the article – this is where analysis begins because you must critique the article by analyzing the evidence given by the piece’s author. You should also point out the flaws in the work and support where it needs to be; it should not necessarily be a positive critique. You are free to pinpoint even the negative part of the story. In other words, you should not rely on one side but be truthful about what you are addressing to the satisfaction of anyone who would read your essay.
• Analyze the piece’s significance – most readers would want to see why you need to make article analysis. It is your role as a writer to emphasize the importance of the article so that the reader can be content with your writing. When your audience gets interested in your work, you will have achieved your aim because the main aim of writing is to convince the reader. The more persuasive you are, the more your article stands out. Focus on motivating your audience, and you will have scored.

Outline and Structure of an Article Analysis

What do you need to write an article analysis, how to write an analysis of an article, step 1: analyze your audience, step 2: read the article.

• The evidence : identify the evidence the writer used in the article to support their claim. While looking into the evidence, you should gauge whether the writer brings out factual evidence or it is personal judgments.
• The argument’s validity: a writer might use many pieces of evidence to support their claims, but you need to identify the sources they use and determine whether they are credible. Credible sources are like scholarly articles and books, and some are not worth relying on for research.
• How convictive are the arguments? You should be able to judge the writer’s persuasion of the audience. An article is usually informative and therefore has to be persuasive to the readers to be considered worthy. If it does not achieve this, you should be able to critique that and illustrate the same.

Step 3: Make the plan

Step 4: write a critical analysis of an article, step 5: edit your essay, article analysis format, article analysis example, what didn’t you know about the article analysis template.

• Read through the piece quickly to get an overview.
• Look for confronting words in the article and note them down.
• Read the piece for the second time while summarizing major points in the literature piece.
• Reflect on the paper’s thesis to affirm and adhere to it in your writing.
• Note the arguments and the evidence used.
• Evaluate the article and focus on your audience.
• Give your opinion and support it to the satisfaction of your audience.

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How to Critically Analyse an Article

Critical analysis refers to the skill required to evaluate an author’s work. Students are frequently asked to critically analyse a particular journal. The analysis is designed to enhance the reader’s understanding of the thesis and content of the article, and crucially is subjective, because a piece of critical analysis writing is a way for the writer to express their opinions, analysis, and evaluation of the article in question. In essence, the article needs to be broken down into parts, each one analysed separately and then brought together as one piece of critical analysis of the whole.

Key point: you need to be aware that when you are analysing an article your goal is to ensure that your readers understand the main points of the paper with ease. This means demonstrating critical thinking skills, judgement, and evaluation to illustrate how you came to your conclusions and opinions on the work. This might sound simple, and it can be, if you follow our guide to critically analyse an article:

• Before you start your essay, you should read through the paper at least three times.
• The first time ensures you understand, the second allows you to examine the structure of the work and the third enables you to pick out the key points and focus of the thesis statement given by the author (if there is one of course!). During these reads and re-reads you can set down bullet points which will eventually frame your outline and draft for the final work.
• Look for the purpose of the article – is the writer trying to inform through facts and research, are they trying to persuade through logical argument, or are they simply trying to entertain and create an emotional response. Examine your own responses to the article and this will guide to the purpose.
• When you start writing your analysis, avoid phrases such as “I think/believe”, “In my opinion”. The analysis is of the paper, not your views and perspectives.
• Ensure you have clearly indicated the subject of the article so that is evident to the reader.
• Look for both strengths and weaknesses in the work – and always support your assertions with credible, viable sources that are clearly referenced at the end of your work.
• Be open-minded and objective, rely on facts and evidence as you pull your work together.

Structure for Critical Analysis of an Article

Remember, your essay should be in three mains sections: the introduction, the main body, and a conclusion.

Introduction

Your introduction should commence by indicating the title of the work being analysed, including author and date of publication. This should be followed by an indication of the main themes in the thesis statement. Once you have provided the information about the author’s paper, you should then develop your thesis statement which sets out what you intend to achieve or prove with your critical analysis of the article.

Key point: your introduction should be short, succinct and draw your readers in. Keep it simple and concise but interesting enough to encourage further reading.

Overview of the paper

This is an important section to include when writing a critical analysis of an article because it answers the four “w’s”, of what, why, who, when and also the how. This section should include a brief overview of the key ideas in the article, along with the structure, style and dominant point of view expressed. For example,

“The focus of this article is… based on work undertaken…  The main thrust of the thesis is that… which is the foundation for an argument which suggests. The conclusion from the authors is that…. However, it can be argued that…

Once you have given the overview and outline, you can then move onto the more detailed analysis.

For each point you make about the article, you should contain this in a separate paragraph. Introduce the point you wish to make, regarding what you see as a strength or weakness of the work, provide evidence for your perspective from reliable and credible sources, and indicate how the authors have achieved, or not their goal in relation to the points made. For each point, you should identify whether the paper is objective, informative, persuasive, and sufficiently unbiased. In addition, identify whether the target audience for the work has been correctly addressed, the survey instruments used are appropriate and the results are presented in a clear and concise way.

If the authors have used tables, figures or graphs do they back up the conclusions made? If not, why not? Again, back up your statements with reliable hard evidence and credible sources, fully referenced at the end of your work.

In the same way that an introduction opens up the analysis to readers, the conclusion should close it. Clearly, concisely and without the addition of any new information not included in the body paragraph.

Key points for a strong conclusion include restating your thesis statement, paraphrased, with a summary of the evidence for the accuracy of your views, combined with identification of how the article could have been improved – in other words, asking the reader to take action.

Key phrases for Critical Analysis of an article

• This article has value because it…
• There is a clear bias within this article based on the focus on…
• It appears that the assumptions made do not correlate with the information presented…
• Aspects of the work suggest that…
• The proposal is therefore that…
• The evidence presented supports the view that…
• The evidence presented however overlooks…
• Whilst the author’s view is generally accurate, it can also be indicated that…
• Closer examination suggests there is an omission in relation to

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Information Literacy Resource Bank

Reading and critically analysing a journal article.

• Explain the broad categorisations of journal articles
• Explain/outline the peer review process whereby an article is submitted for scholarly evaluation by experts
• Suggest questions you need to ask when reading and critically analysing a journal article
• Provide practical tips to facilitate the effective reading and critical analysis of an article

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Research Paper Analysis: How to Analyze a Research Article + Example

Why might you need to analyze research? First of all, when you analyze a research article, you begin to understand your assigned reading better. It is also the first step toward learning how to write your own research articles and literature reviews. However, if you have never written a research paper before, it may be difficult for you to analyze one. After all, you may not know what criteria to use to evaluate it. But don’t panic! We will help you figure it out!

In this article, our team has explained how to analyze research papers quickly and effectively. At the end, you will also find a research analysis paper example to see how everything works in practice.

• 🔤 Research Analysis Definition

📊 How to Analyze a Research Article

✍️ how to write a research analysis.

• 📝 Analysis Example
• 🔎 More Examples

🔗 References

🔤 research paper analysis: what is it.

A research paper analysis is an academic writing assignment in which you analyze a scholarly article’s methodology, data, and findings. In essence, “to analyze” means to break something down into components and assess each of them individually and in relation to each other. The goal of an analysis is to gain a deeper understanding of a subject. So, when you analyze a research article, you dissect it into elements like data sources , research methods, and results and evaluate how they contribute to the study’s strengths and weaknesses.

📋 Research Analysis Format

A research analysis paper has a pretty straightforward structure. Check it out below!

Research articles usually include the following sections: introduction, methods, results, and discussion. In the following paragraphs, we will discuss how to analyze a scientific article with a focus on each of its parts.

How to Analyze a Research Paper: Purpose

The purpose of the study is usually outlined in the introductory section of the article. Analyzing the research paper’s objectives is critical to establish the context for the rest of your analysis.

When analyzing the research aim, you should evaluate whether it was justified for the researchers to conduct the study. In other words, you should assess whether their research question was significant and whether it arose from existing literature on the topic.

Here are some questions that may help you analyze a research paper’s purpose:

• Why was the research carried out?
• What gaps does it try to fill, or what controversies to settle?
• How does the study contribute to its field?
• Do you agree with the author’s justification for approaching this particular question in this way?

How to Analyze a Paper: Methods

When analyzing the methodology section , you should indicate the study’s research design (qualitative, quantitative, or mixed) and methods used (for example, experiment, case study, correlational research, survey, etc.). After that, you should assess whether these methods suit the research purpose. In other words, do the chosen methods allow scholars to answer their research questions within the scope of their study?

For example, if scholars wanted to study US students’ average satisfaction with their higher education experience, they could conduct a quantitative survey . However, if they wanted to gain an in-depth understanding of the factors influencing US students’ satisfaction with higher education, qualitative interviews would be more appropriate.

When analyzing methods, you should also look at the research sample . Did the scholars use randomization to select study participants? Was the sample big enough for the results to be generalizable to a larger population?

You can also answer the following questions in your methodology analysis:

• Is the methodology valid? In other words, did the researchers use methods that accurately measure the variables of interest?
• Is the research methodology reliable? A research method is reliable if it can produce stable and consistent results under the same circumstances.
• Is the study biased in any way?
• What are the limitations of the chosen methodology?

How to Analyze Research Articles’ Results

You should start the analysis of the article results by carefully reading the tables, figures, and text. Check whether the findings correspond to the initial research purpose. See whether the results answered the author’s research questions or supported the hypotheses stated in the introduction.

To analyze the results section effectively, answer the following questions:

• What are the major findings of the study?
• Did the author present the results clearly and unambiguously?
• Are the findings statistically significant ?
• Does the author provide sufficient information on the validity and reliability of the results?
• Have you noticed any trends or patterns in the data that the author did not mention?

How to Analyze Research: Discussion

Finally, you should analyze the authors’ interpretation of results and its connection with research objectives. Examine what conclusions the authors drew from their study and whether these conclusions answer the original question.

You should also pay attention to how the authors used findings to support their conclusions. For example, you can reflect on why their findings support that particular inference and not another one. Moreover, more than one conclusion can sometimes be made based on the same set of results. If that’s the case with your article, you should analyze whether the authors addressed other interpretations of their findings .

Here are some useful questions you can use to analyze the discussion section:

• What findings did the authors use to support their conclusions?
• How do the researchers’ conclusions compare to other studies’ findings?
• How does this study contribute to its field?
• What future research directions do the authors suggest?
• What additional insights can you share regarding this article? For example, do you agree with the results? What other questions could the researchers have answered?

Now, you know how to analyze an article that presents research findings. However, it’s just a part of the work you have to do to complete your paper. So, it’s time to learn how to write research analysis! Check out the steps below!

1. Introduce the Article

As with most academic assignments, you should start your research article analysis with an introduction. Here’s what it should include:

• The article’s publication details . Specify the title of the scholarly work you are analyzing, its authors, and publication date. Remember to enclose the article’s title in quotation marks and write it in title case .
• The article’s main point . State what the paper is about. What did the authors study, and what was their major finding?
• Your thesis statement . End your introduction with a strong claim summarizing your evaluation of the article. Consider briefly outlining the research paper’s strengths, weaknesses, and significance in your thesis.

Keep your introduction brief. Save the word count for the “meat” of your paper — that is, for the analysis.

2. Summarize the Article

Now, you should write a brief and focused summary of the scientific article. It should be shorter than your analysis section and contain all the relevant details about the research paper.

Here’s what you should include in your summary:

• The research purpose . Briefly explain why the research was done. Identify the authors’ purpose and research questions or hypotheses .
• Methods and results . Summarize what happened in the study. State only facts, without the authors’ interpretations of them. Avoid using too many numbers and details; instead, include only the information that will help readers understand what happened.
• The authors’ conclusions . Outline what conclusions the researchers made from their study. In other words, describe how the authors explained the meaning of their findings.

If you need help summarizing an article, you can use our free summary generator .

3. Write Your Research Analysis

The analysis of the study is the most crucial part of this assignment type. Its key goal is to evaluate the article critically and demonstrate your understanding of it.

We’ve already covered how to analyze a research article in the section above. Here’s a quick recap:

• Analyze whether the study’s purpose is significant and relevant.
• Examine whether the chosen methodology allows for answering the research questions.
• Evaluate how the authors presented the results.
• Assess whether the authors’ conclusions are grounded in findings and answer the original research questions.

Although you should analyze the article critically, it doesn’t mean you only should criticize it. If the authors did a good job designing and conducting their study, be sure to explain why you think their work is well done. Also, it is a great idea to provide examples from the article to support your analysis.

4. Conclude Your Analysis of Research Paper

A conclusion is your chance to reflect on the study’s relevance and importance. Explain how the analyzed paper can contribute to the existing knowledge or lead to future research. Also, you need to summarize your thoughts on the article as a whole. Avoid making value judgments — saying that the paper is “good” or “bad.” Instead, use more descriptive words and phrases such as “This paper effectively showed…”

Need help writing a compelling conclusion? Try our free essay conclusion generator !

5. Revise and Proofread

Last but not least, you should carefully proofread your paper to find any punctuation, grammar, and spelling mistakes. Start by reading your work out loud to ensure that your sentences fit together and sound cohesive. Also, it can be helpful to ask your professor or peer to read your work and highlight possible weaknesses or typos.

📝 Research Paper Analysis Example

We have prepared an analysis of a research paper example to show how everything works in practice.

No Homework Policy: Research Article Analysis Example

This paper aims to analyze the research article entitled “No Assignment: A Boon or a Bane?” by Cordova, Pagtulon-an, and Tan (2019). This study examined the effects of having and not having assignments on weekends on high school students’ performance and transmuted mean scores. This article effectively shows the value of homework for students, but larger studies are needed to support its findings.

Cordova et al. (2019) conducted a descriptive quantitative study using a sample of 115 Grade 11 students of the Central Mindanao University Laboratory High School in the Philippines. The sample was divided into two groups: the first received homework on weekends, while the second didn’t. The researchers compared students’ performance records made by teachers and found that students who received assignments performed better than their counterparts without homework.

The purpose of this study is highly relevant and justified as this research was conducted in response to the debates about the “No Homework Policy” in the Philippines. Although the descriptive research design used by the authors allows to answer the research question, the study could benefit from an experimental design. This way, the authors would have firm control over variables. Additionally, the study’s sample size was not large enough for the findings to be generalized to a larger population.

The study results are presented clearly, logically, and comprehensively and correspond to the research objectives. The researchers found that students’ mean grades decreased in the group without homework and increased in the group with homework. Based on these findings, the authors concluded that homework positively affected students’ performance. This conclusion is logical and grounded in data.

This research effectively showed the importance of homework for students’ performance. Yet, since the sample size was relatively small, larger studies are needed to ensure the authors’ conclusions can be generalized to a larger population.

🔎 More Research Analysis Paper Examples

Do you want another research analysis example? Check out the best analysis research paper samples below:

• Gracious Leadership Principles for Nurses: Article Analysis
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• “Family-Based Childhood Obesity Prevention Interventions”: Analysis Research Paper Example
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• Article Analysis: “Perceptions of ADHD Among Diagnosed Children and Their Parents”
• Codependence, Narcissism, and Childhood Trauma: Analysis of the Article
• Relationship Between Work Intensity, Workaholism, Burnout, and MSC: Article Review

We hope that our article on research paper analysis has been helpful. If you liked it, please share this article with your friends!

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NIGHTMARE SUPPLY CHAIN ATTACK SCENARIO —

What we know about the xz utils backdoor that almost infected the world, malicious updates made to a ubiquitous tool were a few weeks away from going mainstream..

Dan Goodin - Apr 1, 2024 6:55 am UTC

On Friday, a lone Microsoft developer rocked the world when he revealed a backdoor had been intentionally planted in xz Utils, an open source data compression utility available on almost all installations of Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. The person or people behind this project likely spent years on it. They were likely very close to seeing the backdoor update merged into Debian and Red Hat, the two biggest distributions of Linux, when an eagle-eyed software developer spotted something fishy.

Further Reading

Researchers have spent the weekend gathering clues. Here's what we know so far.

What is xz Utils?

xz Utils is nearly ubiquitous in Linux. It provides lossless data compression on virtually all Unix-like operating systems, including Linux. xz Utils provides critical functions for compressing and decompressing data during all kinds of operations. xz Utils also supports the legacy .lzma format, making this component even more crucial.

What happened?

Andres Freund, a developer and engineer working on Microsoft’s PostgreSQL offerings, was recently troubleshooting performance problems a Debian system was experiencing with SSH, the most widely used protocol for remotely logging in to devices over the Internet. Specifically, SSH logins were consuming too many CPU cycles and were generating errors with valgrind , a utility for monitoring computer memory.

Through sheer luck and Freund’s careful eye, he eventually discovered the problems were the result of updates that had been made to xz Utils. On Friday, Freund took to the Open Source Security List to disclose the updates were the result of someone intentionally planting a backdoor in the compression software.

It's hard to overstate the complexity of the social engineering and the inner workings of the backdoor. Thomas Roccia, a researcher at Microsoft, published a graphic on Mastodon that helps visualize the sprawling extent of the nearly successful endeavor to spread a backdoor with a reach that would have dwarfed the SolarWinds event from 2020.

What does the backdoor do?

Malicious code added to xz Utils versions 5.6.0 and 5.6.1 modified the way the software functions. The backdoor manipulated sshd, the executable file used to make remote SSH connections. Anyone in possession of a predetermined encryption key could stash any code of their choice in an SSH login certificate, upload it, and execute it on the backdoored device. No one has actually seen code uploaded, so it's not known what code the attacker planned to run. In theory, the code could allow for just about anything, including stealing encryption keys or installing malware.

Wait, how can a compression utility manipulate a process as security sensitive as SSH?

Any library can tamper with the inner workings of any executable it is linked against. Often, the developer of the executable will establish a link to a library that's needed for it to work properly. OpenSSH, the most popular sshd implementation, doesn’t link the liblzma library, but Debian and many other Linux distributions add a patch to link sshd to systemd , a program that loads a variety of services during the system bootup. Systemd, in turn, links to liblzma, and this allows xz Utils to exert control over sshd.

How did this backdoor come to be?

It would appear that this backdoor was years in the making. In 2021, someone with the username JiaT75 made their first known commit to an open source project. In retrospect, the change to the libarchive project is suspicious, because it replaced the safe_fprint funcion with a variant that has long been recognized as less secure. No one noticed at the time.

The following year, JiaT75 submitted a patch over the xz Utils mailing list, and, almost immediately, a never-before-seen participant named Jigar Kumar joined the discussion and argued that Lasse Collin, the longtime maintainer of xz Utils, hadn’t been updating the software often or fast enough. Kumar, with the support of Dennis Ens and several other people who had never had a presence on the list, pressured Collin to bring on an additional developer to maintain the project.

In January 2023, JiaT75 made their first commit to xz Utils. In the months following, JiaT75, who used the name Jia Tan, became increasingly involved in xz Utils affairs. For instance, Tan replaced Collins' contact information with their own on oss-fuzz, a project that scans open source software for vulnerabilities that can be exploited. Tan also requested that oss-fuzz disable the ifunc function during testing, a change that prevented it from detecting the malicious changes Tan would soon make to xz Utils.

In February of this year, Tan issued commits for versions 5.6.0 and 5.6.1 of xz Utils. The updates implemented the backdoor. In the following weeks, Tan or others appealed to developers of Ubuntu, Red Hat, and Debian to merge the updates into their OSes. Eventually, one of the two updates made its way into the following releases, according to security firm Tenable:

There’s more about Tan and the timeline here .

reader comments

Promoted comments.

It should be noted that the attack only works because Debian and Redhat added functionality to sshd that is not present in it as distributed by its developers. The extra functionality adds systemd interaction, which requires libsystemd which requires liblzma, a component of the (compromised) xz package. One should be wary of distributions adding functionality. Often it increases the attack surface, not only because of the modifications/additions themselves, but also by adding dependencies.

So a prime reason this became potentially exploitable is libsystemd in OpenSSH. Need I say more.

The prime reason is a very well funded and capable attacker looked for a way in. if not xz or systemd then they would have attacked via the next candidate weak point.

"This developer persona has touched dozens of other pieces of open-source software in the past few years.". Well, I guess the Opensource community have some codes to review. Maybe the xz incident is only the tips of the iceberg.

Channel Ars Technica

Baltimore bridge collapse: a bridge engineer explains what happened, and what needs to change

Associate Professor, Civil Engineering, Monash University

Disclosure statement

Colin Caprani receives funding from the Department of Transport (Victoria) and the Level Crossing Removal Project. He is also Chair of the Confidential Reporting Scheme for Safer Structures - Australasia, Chair of the Australian Regional Group of the Institution of Structural Engineers, and Australian National Delegate for the International Association for Bridge and Structural Engineering.

Monash University provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation AU.

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When the container ship MV Dali, 300 metres long and massing around 100,000 tonnes, lost power and slammed into one of the support piers of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, the bridge collapsed in moments . Six people are presumed dead, several others injured, and the city and region are expecting a months-long logistical nightmare in the absence of a crucial transport link.

It was a shocking event, not only for the public but for bridge engineers like me. We work very hard to ensure bridges are safe, and overall the probability of being injured or worse in a bridge collapse remains even lower than the chance of being struck by lightning.

However, the images from Baltimore are a reminder that safety can’t be taken for granted. We need to remain vigilant.

So why did this bridge collapse? And, just as importantly, how might we make other bridges more safe against such collapse?

A 20th century bridge meets a 21st century ship

The Francis Scott Key Bridge was built through the mid 1970s and opened in 1977. The main structure over the navigation channel is a “continuous truss bridge” in three sections or spans.

The bridge rests on four supports, two of which sit each side of the navigable waterway. It is these two piers that are critical to protect against ship impacts.

And indeed, there were two layers of protection: a so-called “dolphin” structure made from concrete, and a fender. The dolphins are in the water about 100 metres upstream and downstream of the piers. They are intended to be sacrificed in the event of a wayward ship, absorbing its energy and being deformed in the process but keeping the ship from hitting the bridge itself.

The fender is the last layer of protection. It is a structure made of timber and reinforced concrete placed around the main piers. Again, it is intended to absorb the energy of any impact.

Fenders are not intended to absorb impacts from very large vessels . And so when the MV Dali, weighing more than 100,000 tonnes, made it past the protective dolphins, it was simply far too massive for the fender to withstand.

Read more: I've captained ships into tight ports like Baltimore, and this is how captains like me work with harbor pilots to avoid deadly collisions

Video recordings show a cloud of dust appearing just before the bridge collapsed, which may well have been the fender disintegrating as it was crushed by the ship.

Once the massive ship had made it past both the dolphin and the fender, the pier – one of the bridge’s four main supports – was simply incapable of resisting the impact. Given the size of the vessel and its likely speed of around 8 knots (15 kilometres per hour), the impact force would have been around 20,000 tonnes .

Bridges are getting safer

This was not the first time a ship hit the Francis Scott Bridge. There was another collision in 1980 , damaging a fender badly enough that it had to be replaced.

Around the world, 35 major bridge collapses resulting in fatalities were caused by collisions between 1960 and 2015, according to a 2018 report from the World Association for Waterborne Transport Infrastructure. Collisions between ships and bridges in the 1970s and early 1980s led to a significant improvement in the design rules for protecting bridges from impact.

Further impacts in the 1970s and early 1980s instigated significant improvements in the design rules for impact.

The International Association for Bridge and Structural Engineering’s Ship Collision with Bridges guide, published in 1993, and the American Association of State Highway and Transporation Officials’ Guide Specification and Commentary for Vessel Collision Design of Highway Bridges (1991) changed how bridges were designed.

In Australia, the Australian Standard for Bridge Design (published in 2017) requires designers to think about the biggest vessel likely to come along in the next 100 years, and what would happen if it were heading for any bridge pier at full speed. Designers need to consider the result of both head-on collisions and side-on, glancing blows. As a result, many newer bridges protect their piers with entire human-made islands.

Of course, these improvements came too late to influence the design of the Francis Scott Key Bridge itself.

Lessons from disaster

So what are the lessons apparent at this early stage?

First, it’s clear the protection measures in place for this bridge were not enough to handle this ship impact. Today’s cargo ships are much bigger than those of the 1970s, and it seems likely the Francis Scott Key Bridge was not designed with a collision like this in mind.

So one lesson is that we need to consider how the vessels near our bridges are changing. This means we cannot just accept the structure as it was built, but ensure the protection measures around our bridges are evolving alongside the ships around them.

Second, and more generally, we must remain vigilant in managing our bridges. I’ve written previously about the current level of safety of Australian bridges, but also about how we can do better.

This tragic event only emphasises the need to spend more on maintaining our ageing infrastructure. This is the only way to ensure it remains safe and functional for the demands we put on it today.

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• Open access
• Published: 02 April 2024

Exome-wide analysis implicates rare protein-altering variants in human handedness

• Dick Schijven   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-5190-7241 1 , 2 ,
• Sourena Soheili-Nezhad   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-3571-1270 1 ,
• Simon E. Fisher   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-3132-1996 1 , 2 &
• Clyde Francks   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-9098-890X 1 , 2 , 3  

Nature Communications volume  15 , Article number:  2632 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

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• Behavioural genetics
• Human behaviour
• Rare variants

Handedness is a manifestation of brain hemispheric specialization. Left-handedness occurs at increased rates in neurodevelopmental disorders. Genome-wide association studies have identified common genetic effects on handedness or brain asymmetry, which mostly involve variants outside protein-coding regions and may affect gene expression. Implicated genes include several that encode tubulins (microtubule components) or microtubule-associated proteins. Here we examine whether left-handedness is also influenced by rare coding variants (frequencies ≤ 1%), using exome data from 38,043 left-handed and 313,271 right-handed individuals from the UK Biobank. The beta-tubulin gene TUBB4B shows exome-wide significant association, with a rate of rare coding variants 2.7 times higher in left-handers than right-handers. The TUBB4B variants are mostly heterozygous missense changes, but include two frameshifts found only in left-handers. Other TUBB4B variants have been linked to sensorineural and/or ciliopathic disorders, but not the variants found here. Among genes previously implicated in autism or schizophrenia by exome screening, DSCAM and FOXP1 show evidence for rare coding variant association with left-handedness. The exome-wide heritability of left-handedness due to rare coding variants was 0.91%. This study reveals a role for rare, protein-altering variants in left-handedness, providing further evidence for the involvement of microtubules and disorder-relevant genes.

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Genome-wide association study identifies 48 common genetic variants associated with handedness

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Introduction

Roughly 90% of the human population is right-handed and 10% left-handed 1 , 2 . Despite some regional and temporal variation, this overall bias is broadly consistent across continents, and has been stable through human history 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 . Handedness is a manifestation of brain asymmetry, as right handedness reflects left-hemisphere dominance for control of the preferred hand, and vice versa 7 .

Population-level asymmetries of anatomy and function arise in the human brain during fetal development 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , and right-lateralized predominance of arm movements has been reported already at ten weeks of gestational age 14 . The early appearance of these asymmetries indicates a genetically regulated program of left-right axis development in the central nervous system 1 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 . Consistent with this, left-handedness has shown heritability of roughly 25% in twin-based analysis 19 , and 1–6% in population studies that have assessed the specific contribution of common genetic variants 20 , 21 . Twin- and family-based studies have also reported heritabilities of up to roughly 30% for measures of structural or functional brain asymmetry, particularly for regions or networks important for language 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 , which is lateralized to the left hemisphere in most people.

Genome-wide association studies of human handedness in sample sizes of less than 10,000 individuals did not find significantly associated genetic loci 26 , 27 , but two larger-scale studies 20 , 28 have been performed based on the UK Biobank adult population dataset 29 , which included over 30,000 left-handed and 300,000 right-handed individuals. In these larger studies, three or four genomic loci showed statistically significant associations with left-handedness, depending on study-specific inclusion criteria and methods. The implicated genes included TUBB which encodes a beta-tubulin component of microtubules, and MAP2 and MAPT which encode microtubule-associated proteins. Microtubules are prominent parts of the cytoskeleton – the framework of protein filaments internal to cells – that contributes to a wide range of processes including cellular growth, division, migration, shape and axis formation, axon outgrowth and intracellular transport 30 . It is not known how microtubules affect inter-individual variation in human handedness, but it has been suggested 17 , 31 that they may contribute to cellular chirality early in brain development, and thereby to organ-intrinsic formation of the brain’s left-right axis (see Discussion).

An even larger genome-wide association meta-analysis study of human handedness has also been performed, including the UK Biobank in addition to many other datasets, for a total of 194,198 left-handed and 1,534,836 right-handed individuals 21 . The greater statistical power of this study resulted in 41 genomic loci being significantly associated with left-handedness, including at least eight that implicated tubulins or microtubule-associated proteins, and other genes involved in axon development and neurogenesis 21 .

In addition, genome-wide association scanning using brain imaging data from over 32,000 UK Biobank individuals found 27 independent genetic variants that were significantly associated with different aspects of structural brain asymmetry 17 . Remarkably, almost half of these loci implicated genes that code for tubulins or microtubule-associated proteins 17 . A further study 31 then mapped cerebral cortical structural asymmetry with respect to handedness in 3,062 left-handers and 28,802 right-handers from the UK Biobank, and found that 18 of the 41 handedness-associated genomic loci 21 were also associated with at least one regional cortical asymmetry that is linked to left-handedness. The implicated genes again included several that encode tubulins: TUBB, TUBA1A/TUBA1B/TUBA1C (the latter three genes are clustered together in the genome), TUBB3 and TUBB4A, as well as microtubule-associated proteins MAP2, MAPT and NME7.

All of the large-scale studies mentioned above were based only on common genetic variation, i.e. with allele frequencies in the population of at least half of one percent. It is possible that rare, protein-altering variants also contribute to left-handedness, with larger effects on carriers than the common variants studied so far 32 . One study in an extended, consanguineous family with numerous left-handers did not identify such effects using exome sequencing 33 . In addition, an exploratory study of right-hemisphere language dominance – a trait with roughly 1% frequency that occurs mostly in left-handers – found tentative evidence for rare genetic contributions that implicated the actin cytoskeleton 34 , but that study was based on fewer than 100 unrelated participants. Therefore, rare coding variation has yet to be explored in large-scale studies of human handedness. Identifying rare, coding effects on left-handedness may help to elucidate mechanisms of left-right axis development in the human brain.

Meta-analyses have indicated that left-handedness occurs at increased rates in neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism 35 and schizophrenia 36 . In addition, large-scale studies have found that various aspects of structural brain asymmetry are subtly altered in autism 37 and schizophrenia 38 . These associations suggest that population-typical asymmetries are linked to neurotypical function. Both autism and schizophrenia have shown genetic overlaps with structural brain asymmetry, in terms of common variant effects 17 , 39 . Rare, coding variants are also known to be involved in the genetic architecture of neurodevelopmental disorders 40 , 41 . While most left-handers do not have these disorders, the increased rates of left-handedness in these disorders suggests a minority of left-handedness might arise from rare, protein-coding variants.

A significant genetic correlation has also been reported between left-handedness and Parkinson’s disease, based on common genetic variants 28 . This genetic correlation is at least partly driven by a locus on chromosome 17q21 that spans MAPT and other neighboring genes 28 . MAPT mutations are a known cause of frontotemporal dementia with parkinsonism, and various other neurodegenerative diseases can involve aberrant aggregation of MAPT within neurons 27 .

Here we made use of exome sequence data from the UK Biobank to investigate the contribution of rare, coding variants to left-handedness. We used gene-based analysis to scan for individual genes associated with left-handedness, as well as burden heritability regression 42 to estimate the total, exome-wide contribution of this class of genetic variation. We also queried the extent to which genes that have shown significant associations with schizophrenia, autism, Parkinson’s disease or Alzheimer’s disease in previous large-scale exome sequencing studies might show associations with left-handedness in the present study.

Exome-wide association scan for left-handedness

After sample-level quality control (Methods) there were 313,271 right-handed and 38,043 left-handed individuals (Supplementary Table  1 ). The rate of left-handedness can vary from roughly 2% to 14% in different regions of the world, which is thought primarily to reflect enforced right-hand use in some cultures 2 , 3 , 5 , 6 , 26 . To avoid confounding our genetic association analysis, we defined four separate, genetically homogeneous groups of UK Biobank individuals that correspond to major world ancestries, using a combination of self-reported ethnicity and data-driven genetic clustering: Asian ancestry, Black ancestry, Chinese ancestry, and White ancestry (see Methods and Supplementary Fig.  1 ). As expected, the rate of left-handedness varied between these clusters (Table  1 ). Within each cluster separately we would then test the association of genetic variants with handedness, and finally meta-analyze across clusters.

There were also 6,511 individuals who reported using both hands equally (Table  1 ), but this trait was previously found to have poor repeatability in UK Biobank individuals who reported their handedness on more than one occasion 1 . We excluded this group from our genetic association and heritability analyses.

We focused on exonic variants with frequencies ≤1% that met sequence quality criteria (Supplementary Table  2 , Supplementary Fig.  2 ) and had high likelihoods of affecting protein function (Methods; Supplementary Table  3 ). This “strict” set of variants included frameshift and stop mutations that affect canonical gene transcripts outside of the 5% tail ends of the corresponding proteins, and missense variants when they had Combined Annotation Dependent Depletion (CADD) phred-scaled scores > 20. CADD scores indicate the deleteriousness of genetic variants based on diverse genomic features derived from surrounding sequence context, gene model annotations, evolutionary constraint, epigenetic marks and functional predictions 43 . We also defined a more inclusive, “broad” set of variants that included all “strict” variants plus other variants predicted to have less substantial deleterious effects on protein function (for missense variants this meant CADD phred scores > 1), again with frequencies ≤ 1% (see Methods; Supplementary Table  3 ).

Separately for the strict and broad variant sets, we ran gene-based association analysis with handedness (left-handed versus right-handed) using an additive burden framework, where each individual’s number of minor alleles in a given gene was summed to compute a burden score for that individual and gene 44 . Summary statistics were then meta-analyzed per gene across ancestry groups. There were 18,381 genes analyzed for the strict variant set and 18,925 genes for the broad variant set. Q-Q plots indicated appropriate control of type 1 error (Fig.  1 ).

Top: the strict variant set. Bottom: the broad variant set (that also included the strict variants for this analysis). Left: Manhattan plots show the genome along the x-axis and the gene-wise association significance levels on the y-axis. Dashed lines indicate Bonferroni-based multiple testing correction thresholds. Right: Q-Q plots corresponding to the Manhattan plots (gray shaded areas show 95% confidence intervals for the expected distributions). The exome-wide gene-based association meta-analysis results are provided in a Source Data file.

For both the strict and broad set of variants, one gene showed statistically significant association with handedness after multiple testing correction (Methods): the gene encoding microtubule component beta-tubulin TUBB4B, with association beta = 1.07, P  = 9.9 × 10 −7 for the strict set, and beta = 1.06, P  = 1.2 × 10 −6 for the broad set (Fig.  1 , Supplementary Fig.  3 ). Other genes that showed suggestive evidence for association (with nominal association P values < 1 × 10 −5 ) for the strict and broad sets are shown in Supplementary Table  4 . These included the gene that encodes TRAK1, involved in mitochondrial trafficking within axons and associated with neurodevelopmental delay and seizures 45 , and myotubularin phosphatase MTMR6, involved in secretion and autophagy 46 . The full exome-wide, gene-based meta-analysis results shown in Fig.  1 are provided in the accompanying Source Data file.

For each of 48 genes implicated in left-handedness by the largest previous genome-wide association study based on common genetic variants 21 , we queried our exonic rare-variant association results from the present study. None of these genes showed significant rare-variant associations after Bonferroni correction for 48 tests, for either the strict or broad variant sets (Supplementary Table  5 ). The most significant individual result among these 48 genes was for FOXN2 and the strict variant set, with beta=0.33, P  = 0.0067 (un-corrected). This gene encodes a transcription factor involved in cutaneous and thymic epithelial cell development, but also embryonic central nervous system development (recessive mutation can cause anencephaly and spina bifida) 47 .

Rare TUBB4B variants in the general population

For TUBB4B , the strict variant set comprised 20 variants in 29 left-handed carriers, and 53 variants in 89 right-handed carriers (Fig.  2 ). As left-handers comprised 10.8% of the individuals tested, their rate of rare, deleterious TUBB4B variants (0.076%) was 2.7 times higher than in right-handers (0.028%). All TUBB4B variants were heterozygous, and only one individual carried two different variants, such that many of the variants were present uniquely in single individuals (Fig.  2 ). Only one TUBB4B variant was additionally included in the broad set that was not already included in the strict set (causing amino acid change Asp427Glu), which explains the similarity of strict and broad results for this particular gene. The TUBB4B association with left-handedness was therefore driven by variants that are strongly predicted to be disruptive and deleterious. Strict and broad results were sometimes more divergent for other genes (Fig.  1 ; Supplementary Table  4 ).

Labels in bold indicate variants uniquely observed in either left- or right-handed individuals. The allele count for a given variant is indicated by the number of symbols (circles or diamonds). All variants were heterozygous, and only one individual carried two different variants. Exons and introns of the genomic locus are indicated in the central schema. All but one of the variants (Asp427Glu) met the “strict” criteria for being deleterious. Frameshift mutations were only found in left-handers. Left-handers comprised 10.8% of the individuals in the analyzed dataset, but 32.6% of TUBB4B variant carriers.

Most of the TUBB4B variants caused missense changes, i.e. substituting one amino acid for another at a given point in the protein sequence (Fig.  2 , Supplementary Figs.  4 and 5 ). However, there were two frameshift variants in left-handers, and none in right-handers (Fig.  2 ), despite right-handers out-numbering left-handers by roughly 8:1. Frameshift variants disrupt the triplet reading frame of DNA and result in mis-translation of protein sequence from that point onwards. As such, they are among the most disruptive types of coding variant. Both of the frameshift variants that we found were predicted to cause degradation of the TUBB4B RNA transcript by nonsense-mediated decay (Methods). Therefore, both frameshift variants are likely to lead to haploinsufficiency.

Human TUBB4B shows extremely high conservation of amino acid identities with its orthologs in other vertebrates: 100% homology in chimpanzees, macaques, mice, cattle and dogs, 99.8% in rats, 99.6% in chickens, and 99.3% in clawed frogs (Methods). This high degree of conservation likely contributed to CADD predictions of deleteriousness for many of the TUBB4B missense variants, as the gene appears largely intolerant to variation across vertebrates. As regards other, paralogous beta-tubulin genes, humans have eight of these: TUBB , TUBB1 , TUBB2A , TUBB2B , TUBB3 , TUBB4A , TUBB6 and TUBB8 . For each “strict” variant in TUBB4B we assessed whether it alters the protein sequence at a site that varies between human beta-tubulin paralogs, or is fully conserved across these paralogs (Supplementary Fig.  4 ). The two frameshift mutations were counted among those that affect conserved sites. 15 out of 29 left-handed carriers (52%) had variants that changed sites which are conserved across all paralogs, whereas 31 out of 89 right-handed carriers (35%) had such variants (Fig.  2 , Supplementary Fig.  4 ). This suggests that TUBB4B variants observed in left-handers tend to affect especially critical sites, although the difference was not statistically significant (chi-square = 2.62, one-tailed P  = 0.052).

Other rare, heterozygous TUBB4B missense variants, and also an in-frame ten amino acid duplication, are known to cause sensorineural and/or ciliopathic disorders which can involve infant blindness and early onset hearing loss 48 , 49 , 50 (see Discussion). However, none of the specific TUBB4B amino acid changes that we identified in the UK Biobank were reported in previous clinical genetic studies, and neither were any frameshift mutations. We tested whether TUBB4B variant carriers in the UK Biobank showed group-average differences from the rest of the dataset in terms of speech reception thresholds or visual acuity, or in the frequency of hearing problems, use of a hearing aid, eye problems or use of glasses, while controlling for age and sex (Methods). No associations were significant (all P values > 0.25), which indicates that hearing and vision are not generally affected by the TUBB4B coding variants found in the UK Biobank population dataset (Supplementary Table  6 ).

Gene-based burden heritability of left-handedness

To quantify the heritability of left-handedness attributable to the genome-wide burden of rare, exonic variants, we applied burden heritability regression 42 (Methods). This analysis was performed only in the genetically-informed “White” ancestry cluster, as this was the only cluster with a sufficiently large number of individuals for this type of analysis (300,435 right-handed and 37,177 left-handed; Table  1 ). Variants were stratified by strict versus broad annotations (for this specific analysis the strict variants were removed from the broad set in order to distinguish the heritability arising from deleterious versus relatively benign variants). We also stratified into three variant frequency bins, i) minor allele frequency <1 × 10 −5 ; ii) 1 × 10 −5 ≤ minor allele frequency <1 × 10 −3 ); iii) 1×10 −3 ≤ minor allele frequency ≤ 1 × 10 −2 .

Aggregated across the three frequency bins and strict and broad variants, the burden heritability best estimate (liability scale) was 0.91% (standard error 0.32%) (Table  2 ). For “strict” variants the main contribution was from the two rarest frequency bins (minor allele frequencies <1 × 10 −3 ), whereas for “broad” variants those with minor allele frequencies above 1 × 10 −5 and up to 1% made the main contributions (Table  2 ). Removing TUBB4B from the analysis made little impact on the burden heritability estimates (Table  2 ), which confirms that the population-level, exome-wide burden heritability involves multiple additional loci beyond this single gene.

Rare coding variant associations with neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative disorders in comparison to left-handedness

Recent large-scale association studies based on rare, coding variants identified 24 genes associated with autism 40 , 10 genes associated with schizophrenia 41 , 4 genes associated with Parkinson’s disease 51 , and 5 genes associated with Alzheimer’s disease 52 , at exome-wide significance levels. We queried each of these 43 genes in the rare-variant association results of the present study of left-handedness (Supplementary Tables  7 – 10 ). The autism-associated gene DSCAM (Down syndrome cell adhesion molecule) showed significant association with left-handedness after Bonferroni correction for 43 tests (strict set, beta = 0.17, P  = 3.6 × 10 −4 uncorrected: broad set, beta = 0.15, P  = 5.5 × 10 −4 uncorrected) (Supplementary Table  7 ). DSCAM is involved in central and peripheral nervous system development, including through affecting the interaction of other autism-linked synaptic adhesion molecules 53 . In addition, the autism-associated gene FOXP1 showed significant association with left-handedness after Bonferroni correction for 43 tests for the broad set only (beta = 0.17, P  = 2.3 × 10 −4 uncorrected) (Supplementary Table  7 ). FOXP1 encodes a transcription factor in which disruptive coding variants are known to cause a developmental disorder that includes intellectual disability, autistic features, speech/language deficits, hypotonia and mild dysmorphic features 54 .

None of the genes associated with schizophrenia, Parkinson’s disease or Alzheimer’s disease showed evidence for association with left-handedness after Bonferroni correction (Supplementary Tables  8 – 10 ).

By making use of the large UK Biobank general population dataset for exome-wide screening and burden heritability analysis, our study identified a role for rare, coding variants in left-handedness. At the population level, the heritability of left-handedness due to this class of genetic variant was low, at just under 1%. Nonetheless, the carriers of rare coding variants in TUBB4B , and potentially also DSCAM and FOXP1 , appear to have substantially higher chances of being left-handed than non-carriers. Implicating these specific genes in left-handedness provides potential insights into mechanisms of left-right axis formation in the brain, as well as genetic susceptibility to brain disorders.

As mentioned in the Introduction, several other tubulin genes have been implicated in both left-handedness and structural brain asymmetry by large-scale studies of common genetic variation, including TUBB , the TUBA1A/TUBA1B/TUBA1C cluster on chromosome 12, TUBB3 and TUBB4A , as well as microtubule-associated proteins MAP2 , MAPT and NME7 17 , 21 , 31 . It is therefore especially striking that in a systematic screen of rare coding variation across the entire exome, TUBB4B showed the most significant association with left-handedness in the present study. This finding gives further support for the involvement of microtubules in human brain asymmetry. While the common variants implicating tubulin genes are non-coding and likely to affect gene expression levels, the coding variants in TUBB4B indicate that protein sequence changes of this gene can affect handedness and brain asymmetry.

Other heterozygous missense variants in TUBB4B have been linked to sensorineural and/or ciliopathic disorders 48 , 49 , 50 , but not the specific coding variants that we found in the UK Biobank. Our findings therefore extend the spectrum of phenotypes associated with rare coding TUBB4B variants to include the benign trait of left-handedness. It is thought that some of the heterozygous TUBB4B missense variants that cause disorders act in a dominant-negative manner, through altering microtubule stability and dynamics which can affect microtubule growth 48 , 49 , 50 . A dominant-negative effect arises when an altered protein adversely affects its normal, unaltered counterpart within the same heterozygous cell. It is possible that some of the heterozygous missense TUBB4B variants in the UK Biobank exert dominant-negative or gain-of-function effects that impact microtubule dynamics, but less substantially than the variants that have been linked to clinical disorders. Interactions with microtubule-associated proteins may also be affected. In addition, the two frameshift-causing variants that we found in left-handers in the UK Biobank suggest that haploinsufficiency of TUBB4B might affect brain asymmetry, but again without a clinical phenotype.

One of the many cellular functions of microtubules is in motile cilia, which are organelles that project from the cellular surface and can beat/rotate to produce an extracellular fluid flow 55 . Life on earth is based on L-form amino acids rather than the mirror D-form, and this chirality carries through to the macromolecular scale to influence the structure and movement of cilia 55 , 56 , i.e., they tend to beat/rotate in one particular orientation rather than the other. In the early embryos of many mammalian species, this results in unilateral, leftward fluid flow that can trigger asymmetrical gene expression 55 . Lateralized, downstream developmental programs eventually give rise to asymmetries of visceral organ placement and morphology (of the heart, lungs etc.).

Microtubules support the hair-like structure of cilia and contribute to their motility. Therefore, embryonic motile cilia might seem to provide a potentially common mechanism for the developments of brain and visceral asymmetry. However, the typical left-hemisphere dominances for hand preference and language do not usually reverse in people with situs inversus and primary ciliary dyskinesia, a rare genetic condition that involves reversal of the visceral organs on the left-right axis, together with impairment of motile ciliary function 57 , 58 , 59 , 60 . Furthermore, mutations in tubulin genes are not known as causes of situs inversus of the viscera. Together, these observations suggest a developmental disconnect between brain and visceral asymmetries.

As components of the cytoskeleton, microtubules can also contribute to asymmetries at the whole-cell scale, i.e., create uni-directional biases in the morphology, position, rotation or migration of cells 61 , or the intracellular distributions of organelles 62 . In invertebrates and frog embryos, cellular chirality during embryonic development can induce asymmetrical morphology of certain organs, independently of other developing organs or systems 61 , 63 , 64 , 65 , 66 , 67 , 68 , 69 . Therefore, the cytoskeleton may be a source of left-right axis creation, in addition to motile cilia. An organ-intrinsic, microtubule-based, but non-motile-ciliary mechanism of brain left-right axis formation would fit the human genetic findings that have implicated tubulins such as TUBB4B in handedness, and also match with the disconnect between brain and visceral asymmetries 17 . An involvement of non-motile cilia is also possible.

Brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data was only available for 13 of the UK Biobank TUBB4B variant carriers (left- and right-handers together), which is too small a sample for reliable association mapping with respect to brain structural or functional asymmetries. Neither of the left-handed frameshift variant carriers had MRI data. Studies that identified other TUBB4B mutations in sensorineural and/or ciliopathic disorders also did not report brain scanning 48 , 49 , 50 . However, mutations in different beta-tubulin genes in humans have been identified as causes of extremely rare neurological disorders 70 , and some of those clinical genetic studies did include brain imaging data. Intriguingly, mutations in TUBB2B can cause asymmetrical polymicrogyria (many and small folds) of the cerebral cortex 71 . Mutations in TUBB3 can cause asymmetrical cortical dysplasia and unilateral hypohidrosis (reduced sweating on one side of the body, thought to be linked to disrupted function of the cortex, brain stem, and spine) 72 , 73 . It may therefore be informative to collect brain MRI data from TUBB4B variant carriers in future studies.

More generally, the spectrum of disorders attributable to mutations in alpha- and beta-tubulin isotypes includes features consistent with altered neuronal migration and differentiation, as well as axon guidance and maintenance 70 . The present study suggests that brain left-right axis formation may be another aspect, although as microtubules are multi-functional and essential components of cells, they may also affect asymmetrical brain development through various downstream mechanisms. For instance, assembled microtubules have “plus-ends” and “negative-ends” with specialized functions that contribute to developmental processes such as directional migration of progenitor cells, and axonal/dendritic polarity 74

As regards DSCAM and FOXP1 , although these genes were not significantly associated with left-handedness in the context of exome-wide multiple testing, they showed evidence for association with left-handedness in a targeted look-up of 43 genes that were previously implicated in autism, schizophrenia, Parkinson’s disease or Alzheimer’s disease at exome-wide significant levels, by large-scale studies 40 , 41 , 51 , 52 . Specifically, rare-coding variants in DSCAM and FOXP1 were implicated in autism by a multi-cohort, exome-wide analysis that included nearly 12,000 affected individuals 40 . The present study suggests that rare, coding variants in these genes are also relevant to left-handedness, which raises the possibility that altered development of the brain’s left-right axis is part of the etiology of autism when caused by DSCAM or FOXP1 mutations.

Mutations or copy-number variants affecting DSCAM have also been associated with intellectual disability and schizophrenia, and this gene might additionally contribute to the phenotype of Down’s syndrome 75 , 76 . DSCAM encodes a cell surface receptor and cell adhesion molecule. In the nervous system DSCAM affects various neurodevelopmental processes including neuronal migration, axon growth and branching, synapse development and synaptic plasticity 53 , 76 . In mice, DSCAM contributes to the formation of the spinal locomotor circuit, and is also important in voluntary locomotor control through affecting short-term plasticity and synaptic integration within the motor cortex 77 . Such functions may be relevant to the possible association of DSCAM with handedness in humans. The transcription factor encoded by FOXP1 is involved in a neurodevelopmental disorder that involves intellectual disability with autistic features, together with language impairment 54 . The speech and language phenotype can include dysarthria, motor planning and programming deficits, and linguistic-based phonological errors 78 . The latter aspects may be especially linked to altered brain asymmetry.

In contrast to neurodevelopmental disorders, we saw no evidence that any of nine genes implicated in adult-onset neurodegenerative diseases (Parkinson’s disease or Alzheimer’s disease) by large-scale exome studies were associated with left-handedness. As mentioned in the Introduction, a significant genetic correlation has been reported between left-handedness and Parkinson’s disease based on common genetic variants 28 . This genetic correlation is at least partly contributed by a region of long-range linkage disequilibrium on chromosome 17q21 that spans the gene encoding MAPT and eleven neighboring genes. The region has an unusually complex genomic architecture, which relates to a common inversion polymorphism that spans almost one megabase 79 . Multiple different common genetic variants within this extended genomic locus are associated with left-handedness 20 , brain structural asymmetry 17 , and many other structural and functional brain traits 80 . However, in the present study of rare, protein-coding variation, MAPT showed no association with left-handedness (see the accompanying Source Data file). Four genes encoding tubulin isotypes that have been implicated in neurodegenerative phenotypes by studies in families or singleton patients ( TUBA4A, TUBB2A, TUBB3, TUBB4A ) 81 also showed no nominally significant associations with left-handedness, on the basis of rare, coding variants (Source Data file).

We found that the heritability of left-handedness that was attributable to rare, coding variants, when considered over the whole exome, was just under 1%. This compares to a common single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) based heritability for left-handedness of 1–6% in the UK Biobank 20 , 21 . For a further comparison, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder have shown liability-scale burden heritabilities of 1.7% and 1.8% respectively, when considering predicted loss-of-function variants specifically 42 . Our finding of a significant exome-wide heritability for left-handedness suggests that more genes will be implicated in this trait by rare variant association mapping in even larger, future studies.

Twin studies have not found effects of shared family environment on brain asymmetries 22 , 23 , and left-handedness has shown only subtle associations with environmental, epigenetic and early life factors that have been studied to date 1 , 82 , 83 , 84 . Most of the variation in brain and behavioral asymmetries may therefore arise stochastically in early development 1 , 85 . The low burden heritability and SNP-based heritability of left-handedness, together with the strong population-level bias to right-handedness in the population, suggest that developmental mechanisms for brain asymmetry are largely genetically invariant in the population. This may reflect negative selection of variants in genes involved in brain asymmetry 20 , 86 , 87 . A microtubule-based mechanism of brain left-right axis formation would be consistent with this, because microtubules are essential for many other, fundamental cellular functions 88 , 89 . Accordingly, the TUBB4B protein shows over 99% conservation of amino acid sequence across many vertebrate species.

In conclusion, this study revealed a role for rare, protein-altering variants in human handedness, and provided further evidence that microtubules are involved – possibly through affecting molecular, organelle or cellular chirality early in development. This study also shed light on possible commonalities and differences between rare, coding contributions to left-handedness and brain-related disorders.

For this study we used data from the UK Biobank 90 , 91 . The UK Biobank received ethical approval from the National Research Ethics Service Committee North West-Haydock (reference 11/NW/0382), and all of their procedures were performed in accordance with the World Medical Association guidelines 29 . Written informed consent was provided by all of the enrolled participants.

The present study was conducted as part of UK Biobank registered project 16066, with Clyde Francks as the principal investigator. The study design and conduct complied with all relevant regulations regarding the use of human study participants and was conducted in accordance to the criteria set by the Declaration of Helsinki, with approval from the Ethics Committee Faculty of Social Sciences, Radboud University Nijmegen.

Phenotype data were obtained from data release version 10.1 (available on the UK Biobank research analysis platform ( https://ukbiobank.dnanexus.com ) since 14 April 2022), and the whole exome sequence data were from release version 12.1 (available on the platform since 29 June 2022). We selected “Handedness (chirality/laterality)” (data-field 1707) as our primary phenotype, which was self-reported according to the question “Are you right or left handed?” (presented on a touchscreen). Possible answers were “right-handed,” “left-handed,” “use both left and right hands equally” and “prefer not to answer.” The latter was treated as missing data. Answers were recorded at a maximum of three visits to a UK Biobank assessment center. We used the handedness reported at the first non-missing instance. For individuals who had reported their hand preference at multiple instances, those who were inconsistent in their reported handedness were excluded.

For all individuals with stable handedness data, we selected additional variables to use as covariates: “Sex” (data-field 31), “Year of birth” (data-field 34), “Country of birth” (data-field 1647), “Part of a multiple birth” (data-field 1777), the first 40 principal components derived from common variant genotype data that capture population ancestry (data-field 22009), and the exome sequencing batch (i.e., a binary variable to indicate whether an individual was sequenced as part of the first 50,000 exome release or subsequent releases, due to a difference in the flow cells used). “Country of birth” and “Part of a multiple birth” could be recorded at multiple instances, and again we set these to missing if individuals reported inconsistent answers.

Defining ancestry clusters

We first grouped 469,804 individuals with exome data into five ancestry groups according to self-reported ethnic identities in UK Biobank data-field 21000:

Asian or Asian British (includes sub-fields Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and “any other Asian background”).

Black or Black British (includes sub-fields Caribbean, African, and “any other Black background”).

Chinese (includes only Chinese background).

White (includes British, Irish, and “any other white background”).

Answers of “Do not know,” “Prefer not to answer,” or “Other” were set to missing. Ethnicity was reported at up to four visits. Individuals were only assigned to one of the five ancestry groups if they had non-missing data for at least one instance, and consistently reported their ethnicity with respect to these five groups if reported at multiple instances. For each of the five self-reported ethnic groups separately, we then applied a Bayesian clustering algorithm in the R package “aberrant” version 1.0 92 to genetic ancestry principal components 1–6 (from data-field 22009). This software seeks to define clusters of datapoints and any outliers from them. The “aberrant” package can only cluster along two dimensions, and was therefore run separately three times for each self-reported ethnic grouping: first on principal components 1&2, then 3&4, then 5&6, with inlier threshold lambda = 40. Individuals in the intersect of all three clusters for a given ethnicity were then assigned to one final genetically-informed cluster for each ethnic group.

For the “mixed” ancestry group we obtained a highly dispersed cluster, and therefore these individuals were excluded. See Table  1 , Supplementary Fig.  1 and Supplementary Table  1 for further information.

Sample-level filtering

There were initially 469,316 individuals with whole exome sequence data, and who consistently reported their handedness, country of birth and whether they were part of a multiple birth. We then applied further individual-level quality control. First, individuals with missing data for one or more covariates defined above were excluded. Then we excluded individuals with discordant self-reported and genetically determined sex, as well as those not included in one of the genetically-informed ancestry clusters as described above. For pairs of related individuals inferred as third-degree relatives or closer (kinship coefficient > 0.0442) based on common variant data 90 , we excluded one individual from each pair, prioritizing the removal of right-handed individuals and those present in multiple pairs, but otherwise randomly.

In total, 111,491 individuals were removed by all of these steps together, which left 357,825 remaining individuals. Supplementary Table  1 shows that the majority of exclusions occurred for one of two reasons:

39,170 individuals fell outside of all four of the genetically-informed ancestry clusters that were retained: Asian or Asian British, Black or Black British, Chinese, or White. As the rate of left-handedness varied with ancestry (Table  1 ), then the excluded sample was expected to differ from the included sample in terms of handedness, and other demographic features that correlate with handedness (see details in Supplementary Table  11 ).

62,882 individuals were excluded due to being related to another individual at third degree level or higher. As mentioned above, when such a pair of relatives comprised one right-handed and one-left-handed individual, the left-handed individual was retained. This was done to maximize the number of left-handers for statistical power in genetic association analysis. Again, this meant that the excluded sample necessarily differed from the included sample in terms of handedness, and other demographic features that correlate with handedness (see details in Supplementary Table  11 ).

Of the remaining 357,825 individuals after sample-level filtering, 313,271 were right-handed, 38,043 were left-handed, and 6,511 reported using both hands equally. See Table  1 for a breakdown by ancestry clusters. As mentioned earlier, the “both hands equally” phenotype was not considered in our genetic association and heritability analyses due to a relatively low sample size and poor repeatability, but these individuals were included in our exome sequence pre-processing pipeline, described in the following section.

Whole exome sequence data and filtering

Whole-exome sequencing was performed by the UK Biobank according to protocols described elsewhere 93 , 94 . Specifically we made use of data from the original quality functionally equivalent (OQFE) protocol 93 . We successively applied genotype- and variant-level filters to the exome data of the 357,825 individuals that remained after sample-level filtering in the pVCF files 94 , 95 . First, we only kept variants in the exome sequence target regions (as defined in UK Biobank resource 3803), excluding variants in the 100 base pair flanking regions for which reads had not been checked for coverage and quality metrics in the exome processing pipeline. We also removed any monoallelic variants that arose during merging of the individual-level VCFs. Then, we set individual-level genotypes to no-call if the read depth was <7 for single-nucleotide variant sites or <10 for insertion-deletion sites, and/or if the genotype quality score (GQ) was <20. Variant-level filtering comprised removal of variant sites with an average GQ across genotypes <35, variant missingness rate > 0.10, minor allele count <1, and/or allele balance for variants with exclusively heterozygous genotype carriers <0.15 for single-nucleotide variants and <0.20 for insertion-deletions. Transition-transversion ratios were calculated prior to, and after, variant-level filtering. Filtered pVCF files were converted to PLINK-format binary files (using plink v1.90b6.26), excluding multi-allelic variants, and then merged per chromosome. For chromosome X, pseudo-autosomal (PAR) regions (PAR1: start – basepair 2781479, PAR2: basepair 155701383 – end) were split off from the rest of chromosome X. Any heterozygous genotypes in the non-PAR chromosome X in males were set to missing. See Supplementary Table  2 for the numbers of variants removed at each quality-control filtering step, and Supplementary Fig.  2 for the distribution of numbers of variants per gene after these filters.

Functional annotation and masks

Functional annotation of variants in pVCF files was performed using snpEff v5.1d (build 2022-04-19) 96 . Variants were assigned to genes based on their physical positions in the genome, and were assigned descriptive annotations using information derived from the Ensembl database (release 105). Additionally, variants were annotated with Combined Annotation Dependent Depletion (CADD) Phred scores from the database for nonsynonymous functional prediction (dbNSFP) (version 4.3a) 97 using the snpEff toolbox snpSift 5.1d (build 2022-04-19).

We then classified variants for downstream analyses based on their functional annotations. We first defined a “strict” set of variants with the highest confidence for altering protein function and being deleterious. Strict variants had a “High” annotation for affecting a canonical gene transcript outside of the 5% tail end of the corresponding protein (variants of this type include highly disruptive mutations such as frameshifts), or else a “Moderate” annotation for affecting a canonical transcript together with a CADD Phred score of at least 20 (variants of this type are typically protein-altering missense variants that are especially likely to be deleterious) (Supplementary Table  3 ).

We then defined a more inclusive, “broad” set of variants that included all of the strict variants in addition to several other categories with more equivocal evidence for altering protein function: “High” annotated variants that affected alternative gene transcripts outside of 5% tail ends, “Moderate” annotated variants that affected canonical or alternative gene transcripts with CADD Phred scores of at least 1, and “Modifier” variants that affected canonical or alternative gene transcripts with CADD Phred scores of at least 1 (Supplementary Table  3 ).

Gene-based association analysis

We applied gene-based association testing using the regenie software v3.2.5 44 , which broadly consists of two steps. First, to fit a whole genome regression model to capture phenotypic variance attributable to common genetic effects, we selected a high-quality subset of genetic markers from UK Biobank genotype array data (data category 263). Single-nucleotide polymorphisms with minor allele frequency ≥1%, Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium test p value > 1 × 10 −15 (not for non-PAR chr X), and genotype missingness rate ≤1% were selected using plink (v1.90b6.26). We removed variants with high inter-chromosomal linkage disequilibrium according to Mbatchou et al. 44 and further pruned the data to remove intra-chromosomal linkage disequilibrium (r 2 threshold of 0.9 with a window size of 1000 single-nucleotide polymorphisms and a step size of 100 single-nucleotide polymorphisms), leaving 502,765 single-nucleotide polymorphisms for whole-genome model fitting and calculation of leave-one-chromosome-out (LOCO) predictions.

LOCO predictions were used as input in step 2, together with filtered exome data, handedness phenotypes and covariates as defined above. We ran gene-based analysis with the “ sum “ burden function, with alternative allele frequency threshold of ≤ 1%, and run separately for our strict and broad variant annotation masks (where broad included all strict variants too). Firth likelihood ratio testing was applied in regenie to correct gene p values < 0.05 for the unbalanced left:right handed ratio of the study sample. Genes were tested when at least one variant mapped to a given gene. We then meta-analyzed burden association statistics separately for each gene across the four ancestry groups, using inverse-variance weighted meta-analysis in the METAL software (July 2010 version) 98 . Finally, we applied a Bonferroni-adjusted significance threshold of 2.7 × 10 −6 to account for testing of 18,381 genes with the strict mask, and 2.6 × 10 −6 for testing 18,925 genes with the broad mask.

Burden heritability regression for left-handedness

Burden heritability can be estimated by regressing gene burden trait-association statistics on gene burden scores, where the heritability estimate is proportional to the regression slope, while population stratification and any residual relatedness affect the intercept 42 . As left- and right-handedness are categorical traits in the UK Biobank data, for each autosomal variant we first obtained the allele counts 42 with respect to left- versus right-handedness, as produced from per-variant association analysis in regenie (under an additive model) 44 . We then estimated burden heritability using the BHR v0.1.0 package 42 , stratified by three allele frequency bins: i) minor allele frequency <1 × 10 −5 ; ii) 1 × 10 −5 ≤ minor allele frequency <1 × 10 −3 ); iii) 1 × 10 −3 ≤ minor allele frequency ≤ 1 × 10 −2 , and also stratified by strict versus broad variant types (for this particular analysis the strict variants were removed from the broad set, unlike for the gene-based association scan described above, where the broad set included all strict variants too). We also used BHR to aggregate the burden heritability across frequency bins and across strict and broad variants. The observed-scale burden heritability estimate was converted to a liability-scale estimate, using a sample prevalence of 11% and a population prevalence of 10.4% for left-handedness 2 .

TUBB4B analysis

For the TUBB4B gene, we mapped all 62 variants with “strict” functional annotations onto the canonical protein sequence (National Centre for Biotechnology Information reference NP_006079), and also with respect to each of the eight other human beta-tubulin paralogous proteins: TUBB (UQL51120), TUBB1 (NP_110400), TUBB2A (NP_001060.1), TUBB2B (NP_821080), TUBB3 (NP_006077), TUBB4A (NP_001276058), TUBB6 (AAI11375), TUBB8 (NP_817124) (Supplementary Fig.  4 ). Some variants were present in more than one individual (Fig.  2 ). We counted how many left-handed and right-handed individuals carried variants that altered variable sites as opposed to conserved sites in the various human beta-tubulin paralogs. The two TUBB4B frameshift variants were counted among those that affect conserved sites.

For the two frameshift variants, we also used NMDEscPredictor 99 to predict whether they are subject to degradation by nonsense-mediated decay, through introducing premature stop codons. The frameshift variants were: position 360, −1 and position 604, −4 according to RefSeq transcript NM_006088.

For cross-species comparisons, sequence alignment of human TUBB4B protein (NP_006079) was measured against its orthologs in Pan troglodytes (NP_006079) , Macaca mulatta (NP_006079) , Mus musculus (NP_006079) , Rattus norvegicus (NP_006079), Bos taurus (NP_006079) , Canis lupus familiaris (NP_006079) , Gallus gallus (NP_006079) and Xenopus tropicalis (NP_006079), using blastp ( https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi?PAGE=Proteins ).

We visualized the locations of the 60 “strict” missense changes with respect to the three dimensional structure of the human TUBB4B protein, using MutationExplorer 100 (Supplementary Fig.  5 ). For this, we input Protein Data Bank model “AF-P68371-F1-model_v4” of the human TUBB4B protein, as generated by AlphaFold 101 .

We tested whether TUBB4B variant carriers showed group differences compared to the rest of the UK Biobank individuals for several continuous or categorical traits related to vision and hearing: Speech Reception Threshold, i.e., the signal-to-noise ratio at which half of presented speech could be understood correctly (UK Biobank fields 22219 (left ear) and 20021 (right ear)); Visual acuity (fields 5187 (left eye) and 5185 (right eye)); Hearing difficulties/problems (field 2247); Hearing aid user (field 3393); Eye problems/disorders (field 6148); Wears glasses or contact lenses (2207). These tests were performed using general linear modeling for continuous traits and binomial regression for categorical traits, controlling for age and sex in R software v4.2.1 ( https://www.R-project.org/ ) (Supplementary Table  6 ).

Statistics and reproducibility

No statistical method was used to predetermine the sample size. Rather, the sample included all available participants from the UK Biobank who fulfilled the various criteria detailed in the Methods sections above (Data set, Defining ancestry clusters, Sample-level filtering). Individuals who did not meet the criteria specified and explained in those three Methods sections were excluded. Randomization and blinding were not performed for this observational study.

Reporting summary

Further information on research design is available in the  Nature Portfolio Reporting Summary linked to this article.

Data availability

The primary data used in this study are from the UK Biobank 29 , 90 , 91 , 93 , 94 . The individual-level data can be provided by UK Biobank pending scientific review and a completed material transfer agreement. Requests for the data should be submitted to the UK Biobank: www.ukbiobank.ac.uk . UK Biobank data field/resource/category codes were: Handedness (chirality/laterality) (data-field 1707), “Sex” (data-field 31), “Year of birth” (data-field 34), “Country of birth” (data-field 1647), “Part of a multiple birth” (data-field 1777), genetic ancestry principal components (data-field 22009), self-reported ethnic identities (data-field 21000), “Speech Reception Threshold” (fields 22219 (left ear) and 20021 (right ear)), “Visual acuity” (fields 5187 (left eye) and 5185 (right eye)), “Hearing difficulties/problems” (field 2247), “Hearing aid user” (field 3393), “Eye problems/disorders” (field 6148), “Wears glasses or contact lenses” (field 2207), exome sequence target regions (resource 3803), exome sequence data (category 170), genotype array data (category 263). Other data sources were: Ensembl database (release 105): http://dec2021.archive.ensembl.org/index.html . Database for nonsynonymous functional prediction (dbNSFP) (version 4.3a) 97 . National Centre for Biotechnology Information https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ reference sequence for human TUBB4B transcript NM_006088, and human proteins TUBB4B (NP_006079), TUBB (UQL51120), TUBB1 (NP_110400), TUBB2A (NP_001060.1), TUBB2B (NP_821080), TUBB3 (NP_006077), TUBB4A (NP_001276058), TUBB6 (AAI11375), TUBB8 (NP_817124). Also TUBB4B in Pan troglodytes (NP_006079), Macaca mulatta (NP_006079), Mus musculus (NP_006079), Rattus norvegicus (NP_006079), Bos taurus (NP_006079), Canis lupus familiaris (NP_006079), Gallus gallus (NP_006079) and Xenopus tropicalis (NP_006079). The human TUBB4B model was obtained from the Alphafold Protein Structure Database ( https://alphafold.ebi.ac.uk/entry/P68371 ). Our meta-analyzed gene-based association summary statistics (shown in Fig.  1 ) accompany this paper as a Source Data file.  Source data are provided with this paper.

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Acknowledgements

The study was conducted using the UK Biobank resource under application no. 16066 with C.F. as the principal applicant. This research was funded by the Max Planck Society (Germany) and the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (Language in Interaction consortium: Gravitation grant number 024.001.006 2022.LiI.PD.MPI.023 (to C.F.)). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, the decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript. Thanks to Carsten Janke for thoughts on the TUBB4B mutation analysis.

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Conceptualization: D.S., S.E.F., C.F. Data curation: D.S., S.S.N. Formal analysis: D.S. Funding acquisition: C.F., S.E.F. Investigation: D.S., C.F. Methodology: D.S., S.S.N., C.F. Project administration: C.F. Resources: C.F., S.E.F. Software: D.S. Supervision: C.F. Visualization: D.S., C.F. Writing – original draft: D.S., C.F. Writing – review & editing: D.S., S.S.N., S.E.F., C.F.

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Schijven, D., Soheili-Nezhad, S., Fisher, S.E. et al. Exome-wide analysis implicates rare protein-altering variants in human handedness. Nat Commun 15 , 2632 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-46277-w

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A lawyer used ChatGPT to prepare a court filing. It went horribly awry.

By Megan Cerullo

Updated on: May 29, 2023 / 5:40 PM EDT / MoneyWatch

A lawyer who relied on ChatGPT to prepare a court filing on behalf of a man suing an airline is now all too familiar with the artificial intelligence tool's shortcomings — including its propensity to invent facts. 

Roberto Mata sued Colombian airline Avianca last year, alleging that a metal food and beverage cart injured his knee on a flight to Kennedy International Airport in New York. When Avianca asked a Manhattan judge to dismiss the lawsuit based on the statute of limitations, Mata's lawyer, Steven A. Schwartz, submitted a brief based on research done by ChatGPT, Schwartz, of the law firm Levidow, Levidow & Oberman, said in an affidavit . 

While ChatGPT can be useful to professionals in numerous industries, including the legal profession, it has proved itself to be both limited and unreliable. In this case, the AI invented court cases that didn't exist, and asserted that they were real.

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Megan Cerullo is a New York-based reporter for CBS MoneyWatch covering small business, workplace, health care, consumer spending and personal finance topics. She regularly appears on CBS News Streaming to discuss her reporting.

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The coming 2025 tax A tax is a mandatory payment or charge collected by local, state, and national governments from individuals or businesses to cover the costs of general government services, goods, and activities. debate is riddled with trillion-dollar questions. The revenue price tag of extending current tax policies for individuals and reversing some base broadeners for companies will exceed $3 trillion dollars .

Over the past year, Tax Foundation economists have evaluated multiple options for changing the trajectory of federal tax policies.

Using our Taxes and Growth Model , we can measure the revenue impact of tax policies conventionally (without economic feedback) and dynamically (with economic feedback).

Not all policy changes are created equal. A policy change that grows the economy can raise more (or lose less) revenue on a dynamic basis than it does on a conventional basis. On the other hand, policy changes that shrink the economy will usually raise more (or lose less) revenue on a conventional basis than on a dynamic basis.

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The dynamic and conventional revenue impacts are shown in Figure 1. Extending the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act would reduce federal revenues significantly, even after accounting for the larger economy. The larger economy would support about $600 billion in additional revenue, but this is not enough to cover the cost of a multi-trillion dollar tax cut.

The second policy scenario is President Biden’s budget for fiscal year 2025, which proposes more than $3.4 trillion in net tax increases that will reduce investment and overall economic activity. The smaller economy means that, realistically, tax revenues will not hit that $3 trillion mark. Roughly $770 billion will be shaved off due to the smaller economy, resulting in our estimated net revenue increase of $2.6 trillion.

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Six examples from Tax Foundation’s recent work, summarized below, provide policymakers other options to consider, along with their revenue and economic impacts. In the coming weeks, we will release yet another option for a revenue-neutral, pro-growth reform that would keep many Tax Cuts and Jobs Act policies in place while building on some of its successes and avoiding some of its pitfalls.

Option 1: A Tax Reform for Growth and Opportunity

The first reform is transformative and would support a larger economy while also increasing tax revenue. It includes a flat tax An income tax is referred to as a “flat tax” when all taxable income is subject to the same tax rate, regardless of income level or assets. of 20 percent on individual income and a distributed profits tax A distributed profits tax is a business-level tax levied on companies when they distribute profits to shareholders, including through dividends and net share repurchases (stock buybacks). of 20 percent (replacing current business tax rules), while also eliminating taxes at death and simplifying the treatment of capital gains.

In addition to supporting a larger economy, it would dramatically simplify the tax system.

Over 10 years, this reform would increase federal revenues by $523 billion on a conventional basis and by $1.4 trillion on a dynamic basis. Read more

Option 2: Broad-Based Value-Added Tax

This reform is similarly transformative. It replaces the corporate income tax A corporate income tax (CIT) is levied by federal and state governments on business profits. Many companies are not subject to the CIT because they are taxed as pass-through businesses , with income reportable under the individual income tax . with a value-added tax (VAT), while also replacing current tax credits for workers and families (child tax credit A tax credit is a provision that reduces a taxpayer’s final tax bill, dollar-for-dollar. A tax credit differs from deductions and exemptions, which reduce taxable income, rather than the taxpayer’s tax bill directly. , earned income tax credit, and child and dependent care tax credit) with a rebate.

The VAT is much less harmful to investment and a growing economy, so the reform would lead to a larger economy than current tax policies. Over 10 years, it would increase federal revenues by $569 billion on a conventional basis and by $24 billion on a dynamic basis.

Over the longer run (beyond the 10 year time frame), this option retains a positive economic effect and is approximately revenue neutral even on a conventional basis. Read more

Option 3: Business Profits and Household Compensation Reform

This reform would replace the current corporate and individual income taxes with a tax on business cash flows and a progressive tax A progressive tax is one where the average tax burden increases with income. High-income families pay a disproportionate share of the tax burden, while low- and middle-income taxpayers shoulder a relatively small tax burden. on household compensation with a per person credit (in lieu of the same credits replaced in Option 2).

This reform also supports a much larger economy, but it would reduce revenues, even after accounting for the larger economy. Over 10 years, this reform would decrease federal revenues by $1 trillion on a conventional basis and by $130 billion on a dynamic basis. Read more

Option 4: Increase the Federal Gas Tax A gas tax is commonly used to describe the variety of taxes levied on gasoline at both the federal and state levels, to provide funds for highway repair and maintenance, as well as for other government infrastructure projects. These taxes are levied in a few ways, including per-gallon excise taxes , excise taxes imposed on wholesalers, and general sales taxes that apply to the purchase of gasoline. by $0.35 and Index It for Inflation Inflation is when the general price of goods and services increases across the economy, reducing the purchasing power of a currency and the value of certain assets. The same paycheck covers less goods, services, and bills. It is sometimes referred to as a “ hidden tax ,” as it leaves taxpayers less well-off due to higher costs and “bracket creep,” while increasing the government’s spending power.

This option may not be politically popular, but it is straightforward. The federal gas tax has not been increased since 1993 and is currently still 18.4 cents per gallon. The gas tax is a tax on consumption, and raising it would have relatively little effect on the long-term trajectory of the economy.

Over 10 years, this reform would increase federal revenues by $931 billion on a conventional basis and by $797 billion on a dynamic basis. Read more

Option 5: Eliminate Exclusion for Employer-Sponsored Health Insurance

This next reform simply broadens the tax base The tax base is the total amount of income, property, assets, consumption, transactions, or other economic activity subject to taxation by a tax authority. A narrow tax base is non-neutral and inefficient. A broad tax base reduces tax administration costs and allows more revenue to be raised at lower rates. . The largest exclusion from the U.S. tax base is the exclusion for employer-sponsored health insurance. The cost is a deductible expense for employers, and it is not taxed as income for employees. However, the benefits are truly “income” in the economic sense. Even after accounting for a smaller economy, this reform would raise substantial revenue.

Over 10 years, this expansion of the tax base would increase federal revenues by $3.5 trillion on a conventional basis and by $3.1 trillion on a dynamic basis. Read more

Option 6: 28 Percent Corporate Tax Rate and 50 Percent Top Personal Income Tax Rate

As a contrast to the other revenue-raising options, this reform would increase both the corporate income tax rate and the top personal income tax rate. Currently, those rates are 21 percent for companies and 37 percent for high earners.

These reforms would distort economic decisions and lead to a smaller economy.

Over 10 years, the higher tax rates would increase federal revenues by $2.8 trillion on a conventional basis and by $2.1 trillion on a dynamic basis. Read more

Given that U.S. debt is roughly the size of our annual economic output, policymakers will face many tough fiscal choices in the coming years. The good news is there are policies that both support a larger economy and avoid adding to the debt. By choosing these options, Congress can set the U.S. on the path to fiscal sustainability.

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• Knowledge Base

Methodology

• How to Do Thematic Analysis | Step-by-Step Guide & Examples

How to Do Thematic Analysis | Step-by-Step Guide & Examples

Published on September 6, 2019 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on June 22, 2023.

Thematic analysis is a method of analyzing qualitative data . It is usually applied to a set of texts, such as an interview or transcripts . The researcher closely examines the data to identify common themes – topics, ideas and patterns of meaning that come up repeatedly.

There are various approaches to conducting thematic analysis, but the most common form follows a six-step process: familiarization, coding, generating themes, reviewing themes, defining and naming themes, and writing up. Following this process can also help you avoid confirmation bias when formulating your analysis.

This process was originally developed for psychology research by Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke . However, thematic analysis is a flexible method that can be adapted to many different kinds of research.

Table of contents

When to use thematic analysis, different approaches to thematic analysis, step 1: familiarization, step 2: coding, step 3: generating themes, step 4: reviewing themes, step 5: defining and naming themes, step 6: writing up, other interesting articles.

Thematic analysis is a good approach to research where you’re trying to find out something about people’s views, opinions, knowledge, experiences or values from a set of qualitative data – for example, interview transcripts , social media profiles, or survey responses .

Some types of research questions you might use thematic analysis to answer:

• How do patients perceive doctors in a hospital setting?
• What are young women’s experiences on dating sites?
• What are non-experts’ ideas and opinions about climate change?
• How is gender constructed in high school history teaching?

To answer any of these questions, you would collect data from a group of relevant participants and then analyze it. Thematic analysis allows you a lot of flexibility in interpreting the data, and allows you to approach large data sets more easily by sorting them into broad themes.

However, it also involves the risk of missing nuances in the data. Thematic analysis is often quite subjective and relies on the researcher’s judgement, so you have to reflect carefully on your own choices and interpretations.

Pay close attention to the data to ensure that you’re not picking up on things that are not there – or obscuring things that are.

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Once you’ve decided to use thematic analysis, there are different approaches to consider.

There’s the distinction between inductive and deductive approaches:

• An inductive approach involves allowing the data to determine your themes.
• A deductive approach involves coming to the data with some preconceived themes you expect to find reflected there, based on theory or existing knowledge.

Ask yourself: Does my theoretical framework give me a strong idea of what kind of themes I expect to find in the data (deductive), or am I planning to develop my own framework based on what I find (inductive)?

There’s also the distinction between a semantic and a latent approach:

• A semantic approach involves analyzing the explicit content of the data.
• A latent approach involves reading into the subtext and assumptions underlying the data.

Ask yourself: Am I interested in people’s stated opinions (semantic) or in what their statements reveal about their assumptions and social context (latent)?

After you’ve decided thematic analysis is the right method for analyzing your data, and you’ve thought about the approach you’re going to take, you can follow the six steps developed by Braun and Clarke .

The first step is to get to know our data. It’s important to get a thorough overview of all the data we collected before we start analyzing individual items.

This might involve transcribing audio , reading through the text and taking initial notes, and generally looking through the data to get familiar with it.

Next up, we need to code the data. Coding means highlighting sections of our text – usually phrases or sentences – and coming up with shorthand labels or “codes” to describe their content.

Let’s take a short example text. Say we’re researching perceptions of climate change among conservative voters aged 50 and up, and we have collected data through a series of interviews. An extract from one interview looks like this:

In this extract, we’ve highlighted various phrases in different colors corresponding to different codes. Each code describes the idea or feeling expressed in that part of the text.

At this stage, we want to be thorough: we go through the transcript of every interview and highlight everything that jumps out as relevant or potentially interesting. As well as highlighting all the phrases and sentences that match these codes, we can keep adding new codes as we go through the text.

After we’ve been through the text, we collate together all the data into groups identified by code. These codes allow us to gain a a condensed overview of the main points and common meanings that recur throughout the data.

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Next, we look over the codes we’ve created, identify patterns among them, and start coming up with themes.

Themes are generally broader than codes. Most of the time, you’ll combine several codes into a single theme. In our example, we might start combining codes into themes like this:

At this stage, we might decide that some of our codes are too vague or not relevant enough (for example, because they don’t appear very often in the data), so they can be discarded.

Other codes might become themes in their own right. In our example, we decided that the code “uncertainty” made sense as a theme, with some other codes incorporated into it.

Again, what we decide will vary according to what we’re trying to find out. We want to create potential themes that tell us something helpful about the data for our purposes.

Now we have to make sure that our themes are useful and accurate representations of the data. Here, we return to the data set and compare our themes against it. Are we missing anything? Are these themes really present in the data? What can we change to make our themes work better?

If we encounter problems with our themes, we might split them up, combine them, discard them or create new ones: whatever makes them more useful and accurate.

For example, we might decide upon looking through the data that “changing terminology” fits better under the “uncertainty” theme than under “distrust of experts,” since the data labelled with this code involves confusion, not necessarily distrust.

Now that you have a final list of themes, it’s time to name and define each of them.

Defining themes involves formulating exactly what we mean by each theme and figuring out how it helps us understand the data.

Naming themes involves coming up with a succinct and easily understandable name for each theme.

For example, we might look at “distrust of experts” and determine exactly who we mean by “experts” in this theme. We might decide that a better name for the theme is “distrust of authority” or “conspiracy thinking”.

Finally, we’ll write up our analysis of the data. Like all academic texts, writing up a thematic analysis requires an introduction to establish our research question, aims and approach.

We should also include a methodology section, describing how we collected the data (e.g. through semi-structured interviews or open-ended survey questions ) and explaining how we conducted the thematic analysis itself.

The results or findings section usually addresses each theme in turn. We describe how often the themes come up and what they mean, including examples from the data as evidence. Finally, our conclusion explains the main takeaways and shows how the analysis has answered our research question.

In our example, we might argue that conspiracy thinking about climate change is widespread among older conservative voters, point out the uncertainty with which many voters view the issue, and discuss the role of misinformation in respondents’ perceptions.

If you want to know more about statistics , methodology , or research bias , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

• Normal distribution
• Measures of central tendency
• Chi square tests
• Confidence interval
• Quartiles & Quantiles
• Cluster sampling
• Stratified sampling
• Discourse analysis
• Cohort study
• Peer review
• Ethnography

Research bias

• Implicit bias
• Cognitive bias
• Conformity bias
• Hawthorne effect
• Availability heuristic
• Attrition bias
• Social desirability bias

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Robinhood’s new Gold Card, BaaS challenges and the tiny startup that caught Stripe’s eye

Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech (formerly The Interchange)! This week, we’re looking at Robinhood’s new Gold Card, challenges in the BaaS space and how a tiny startup caught Stripe’s eye.

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important fintech stories delivered to your inbox every Sunday at 7:30 a.m. PT, subscribe here . 

The big story

Robinhood took the wraps off its new Gold Card last week to much fanfare. It has a long list of impressive features, including 3% cash back and the ability to invest that cash back via the company’s brokerage account. A user can also put that cash back into Robinhood’s savings account, which offers 5% APY.  We’re curious to see how this new card will impact the company’s bottom line. But also, we are fascinated by how Robinhood incorporated the technology it acquired when buying startup X1 last summer for $95 million and turned it into a potentially very lucrative new offering.

Analysis of the week

The banking-as-a-service (BaaS) space is facing challenges. BaaS startup Synctera recently conducted a restructuring that affects about 15% of employees. The startup is not the only VC-backed BaaS company to have resorted to layoffs to preserve cash over the past year. Treasury Prime, Synapse and Figure have as well. Meanwhile, according to American Banker , the FDIC announced consent orders against Sutton Bank and Piermont Bank, telling them “to keep a closer eye on their fintechs’ compliance with the Bank Secrecy Act and money laundering rules.”

Dollars and cents

PayPal Ventures’ latest investment is in Qoala , an Indonesian startup that provides personal insurance products covering a variety of risks , including accidents and phone screen damage. MassMutual Ventures also participated in Qoala’s new $47 million round of funding .

New Retirement , a Mill Valley–based company building software to help people create financial retirement plans, has raised $20 million in a tranche of funding.

We last checked in on Zaver , a Swedish B2C buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) provider in Europe, when it raised a $5 million funding round in 2021. The company has now closed a $10 million extension to its Series A funding round, bringing its total Series A to $20 million.

What else we’re writing

Read all about how a tiny four-person startup, Supaglue , caught Stripe’s eye . Supaglue, formerly known as Supergrain, is an open source developer platform for user-facing integrations. The team is going to help Stripe on real-time analytics and reporting across its platform and third-party apps for its Revenue and Finance Automation suite.

Maju Kuruvilla is no longer CEO of one-click checkout company Bolt . He is replaced by Justin Grooms, Bolt’s global head of sales, who is now interim CEO. Kuruvilla, the former Amazon executive, took over as CEO in January 2022 after founder Ryan Breslow stepped down. The Information has more about Bolt’s woes here .

High-interest headlines

Inside Mercury’s stumble from fintech hero to target of the feds

RealPage and Plaid team to curb rental fraud

In HR software battle, Rippling makes up ground against Deel — at a cost 

Is Chime ready for an IPO? It has more primary customers than Chase

Inside a CEO’s bold claims about her hot fintech startup , which TC previously covered here .

Cloverleaf raises $7.3M in Series A extension

Abrigo acquires TPG Software

Want to reach out with a tip? Email me at [email protected] or send me a message on Signal at 408.204.3036. You can also send a note to the whole TechCrunch crew at [email protected]. For more secure communications, click here to contact us , which includes SecureDrop ( instructions here ) and links to encrypted messaging apps.

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G.O.P. Congressman’s Wild Claim: F.B.I. Entrapped Jan. 6 Rioters

More than three years after the attack on Congress, a Republican subcommittee chairman offered a series of baseless and disproved claims about it, reflecting an effort on the right to falsify what occurred.

By Luke Broadwater and Alan Feuer

Luke Broadwater reported from Washington, and Alan Feuer from New York.

Even by a conspiracy theorist’s standards, the wild claims made by Representative Clay Higgins, Republican of Louisiana, stand out.

The hard-right congressman, now in his fourth term in the House, has said that “ghost buses” took agents provocateurs to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to instigate the riot. He has claimed that the federal government is waging a “civil war” against Texas . And he has called the criminal charges against former President Donald J. Trump for mishandling classified documents a “ perimeter probe from the oppressors .”

But far from relegating Mr. Higgins to the fringe of their increasingly fractious conference, House Republicans have elevated him. They made him the chairman of the subcommittee overseeing border enforcement, and Speaker Mike Johnson named him one of 11 impeachment managers tasked with trying to remove the homeland security secretary from office in a Senate trial set to take place next week.

None of it has dampened Mr. Higgins’s penchant for spreading unsupported theories, many of which portray law enforcement and the government in an evil, conspiratorial light.

This week, in a lengthy podcast interview, he expounded at length on his belief — based, he said, on his own extensive investigation and evidence that only he has been able to see — that federal law enforcement officers entrapped Mr. Trump’s supporters into violently attacking the Capitol on Jan. 6. He was repeating a conspiracy theory that has been debunked repeatedly.

Over the course of a two-hour interview on the “Implicit Bias” podcast, Mr. Higgins, wearing a shirt emblazoned with the logo of the Three Percenters, a right-wing antigovernment militia, repeated the lie that the 2020 election was fraudulent. He laid out an outlandish story that tied the rise of the coronavirus pandemic to what he said was a plot by the government to infiltrate pro-Trump online forums and urge members to engage in “riotous” behavior, as he put it.

Finally, he said, also groundlessly, that federal agents posing as Trump supporters traveled to Washington on Jan. 6 and tricked Mr. Trump’s backers into carrying out mob violence.

It was the latest reminder that, more than three years after the attack, right-wing Republicans at every level continue to spread falsehoods about what happened on Jan. 6 and are now seeking to use those lies as a rallying cry to denounce the government, promote Mr. Trump’s candidacy and rile up his supporters.

Mr. Higgins claimed that he had conducted his own investigation into what happened that day. He predicted that once House Republicans finish posting security footage of the attack online, charges against Jan. 6 defendants would crumble.

“The whole thing,” Mr. Higgins said, “was a nefarious agenda to entrap MAGA Americans.”

Mr. Higgins, who before coming to Congress was accused of using unnecessary force when he was a police officer , later gained fame through a series of popular videos that earned him the nickname “Cajun John Wayne.”

Now he is the chairman of the House Homeland Security subcommittee on border enforcement. Neither Mr. Higgins nor Mr. Johnson responded to requests for comment about his podcast appearance.

The outspoken Louisianian has long trafficked in conspiracy theories, but the podcast interview that aired this week, which he promoted on social media, covered an unusually wide range of them.

For instance, Mr. Higgins said it was “very suspicious” that while votes in the presidential election were being counted, Joseph R. Biden Jr. overtook Mr. Trump in certain key states.

Describing the frustration of Trump supporters ahead of Jan. 6, he said, “We were witnessing the death of our republic.”

There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election. That was a lie Mr. Trump told after he lost.

Mr. Higgins then laid out a long and convoluted theory that federal law enforcement embedded itself in various groups of Trump supporters around the country after the onset of the coronavirus pandemic — whose origins he said were suspicious on their own — riled them up and then encouraged them to go to the Capitol on Jan. 6.

“The original seeds of riotous or illegal or occupation behavior amongst these groups were planted by the F.B.I.-embedded agents in those groups,” Mr. Higgins claimed.

In fact, it was Mr. Trump who called for his supporters to amass in Washington on Jan. 6, telling them, “Be there, will be wild!”

No Jan. 6 defendant has successfully argued entrapment as a defense in court. Even a lawyer for the Proud Boys extremist group, whose members were charged with seditious conspiracy in connection with the attack, stood up in court last year and called that theory “slander.”

The fact that some F.B.I. informants were in the crowd of tens of thousands has long been known , but it does not suggest the federal government was behind the attack. If anything, it points to the opposite: that the F.B.I. failed at using the assets it had in extremist organizations to learn in advance that an attack might be coming.

Steven M. D’Antuono, the former leader of the F.B.I.’s Washington field office, testified before the House Judiciary Committee that he believed there may have been a “handful” of people who had previously served as informants for field offices who were in the crowd that day. But, he said, they had not been asked by the bureau to attend.

Most of the known informants in far-right groups like the Proud Boys were not, by their own accounts , recruited by the F.B.I. to reveal secrets about their own organizations. Instead, they have said they were approached by the bureau to share what they knew about leftist movements like antifa.

One of the F.B.I. informants in the crowd on Jan. 6 was James Ehren Knowles, a member of the Proud Boys Kansas City chapter. Right-wing politicians and pundits have sought to spin Mr. Knowles’s presence at the Capitol into a narrative suggesting that the bureau used covert operatives to instigate the riot, but he told a very different story under oath during the Proud Boys’ seditious conspiracy trial.

Mr. Knowles testified that he was not acting “at the direction of the F.B.I.” that day, but had joined the crowd as a member of the far-right group — or what a prosecutor described as “an independent human” making his own decisions.

Mr. Higgins said his claims of “ghost buses” came from a whistle-blower who said he saw two white tour buses at Union Station early in the morning on Jan. 6, which later disappeared. Tour buses carrying visitors to Washington are a nearly omnipresent sight in the area, especially on days when large events — such as Mr. Trump’s rally on the Ellipse on Jan. 6 — are planned.

“We don’t know what happened to them,” Mr. Higgins said ominously during the podcast. “I don’t run the F.B.I., man.”

Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director, has said unequivocally that his agency had no role in causing the riot at the Capitol. “If you are asking whether the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6 was part of some operation orchestrated by F.B.I. sources and/or agents,” Mr. Wray said, “the answer is emphatically no.”

As his podcast hosts sampled expensive whiskey, Mr. Higgins claimed that the unreleased Capitol surveillance footage would clear the Jan. 6 rioters, and he said he had access to inside information from their trials.

“Once this is all out, then these J6 prosecutions are going to start falling apart,” Mr. Higgins said. “And you’re going to see reversals of prosecution.”

But defendants and their lawyers would have access to the same information, including the Capitol security footage in the possession of House Republicans.

The Justice Department has charged more than 1,350 people in connection with the attack on the Capitol. The charges show a range of culpability. Some, including the leader of the Oath Keepers militia , have been convicted of seditious conspiracy and sentenced to lengthy prison terms. Others have been charged with merely trespassing and received no jail sentence.

The videos also show a range of approaches by police officers in different situations. Some fought a bloody battle to keep rioters from breaching the building; some tried to use persuasion to get people to leave the halls of Congress. Badly outnumbered, others are shown merely monitoring the crowd.

Six Capitol Police officers, out of a force of 2,000, were disciplined for their actions during the riot, including for unbecoming conduct and failure to comply with directives. But many more fought strenuously to keep the rioters out. About 150 police officers were injured during the assault.

Luke Broadwater covers Congress with a focus on congressional investigations. More about Luke Broadwater

Alan Feuer covers extremism and political violence for The Times, focusing on the criminal cases involving the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and against former President Donald J. Trump.  More about Alan Feuer

A Divided Congress: Latest News and Analysis

G.O.P. Congressman’s Wild Claim: More than three years after the attack on Congress, a Republican subcommittee chairman offered a series of baseless and disproved claims  about it, reflecting an effort on the right to falsify what occurred.

Plan for Ukraine Aid: Speaker Mike Johnson has begun laying out potential conditions for extending a fresh round of military assistance  to Ukraine, the strongest indication yet that he plans to push  through a package that many Republicans have tried to block.

Replacing Mitch McConnell: The intensifying battle for a new Senate Republican leader recalls an earlier era , when such races in Congress were crowded and sometimes messy affairs.

Spending Bill: A  bipartisan spending package  approved by Congress ended the prospect of a government shutdown. But the legislation also represented a major defeat for ultraconservatives in the House, who immediately turned on Johnson .

A Dwindling Majority: Representative Mike Gallagher, Republican of Wisconsin, announced that he would resign from Congress months earlier than expected on April 19, bringing the already minuscule G.O.P. majority down to a lonely one vote .

An Invite for Netanyahu: Johnson said that he planned to invite Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to address Congress, moving to welcome a leader who has become a flashpoint for partisan disagreement  over the war in Gaza.