[jghn]

I was taught to read the abstract, then the conclusion, then look at the figures, and maybe dig into other sections if there's something that drew my interest.

Given the variety of responses here, I wonder if some of this is domain specific.

[nis251413]

It depends also on what you want to get from the article. Usually I focus on the methods section to really understand what the paper did (usually I read experimental papers in cognitive science/neuroscience). I may read parts of the results, but hopefully they have figures that summarize them so I do not have to read much. I rarely read the conclusion section and in general I do not care much about how authors interpret their results, because people can make up anything and if one does not read the methods can get really mislead by the authors' biases.