The students in my seminar are asked to present professional articles in order to write their theses. When you present an article/a paper, you should explain it as follows:
- What is the motivation & new finding:
- Basic Model:
- The main theorem/finding following the model:
- Conclusion or Final remarks.
Any professional articles must include new findings. So, whenever you read them, you need to focus on what the new findings are, why they are important, & what the deferences from the previous works are. Usually those are explained in Introduction of each paper.
However, even when you know them through introduction, it is just intuitive explanations. So after understanding the motivations, results, and the importance, you carefully read to know how to derive the results by the models and econometric analysis.
In the above sense, even when you understand the importance of papers through Introduction, we do not usually say that you read the papers. So, when you prepare a presentation to explain any paper, you should explain the models and how to derive the main results from the models.