PurposeThis study developed two presentation modes of scientific articles and evaluated their usability with user experiments.Design/methodology/approachTwo presentation modes of scientific articles, simply referred to as “genre presentation mode” and “argument presentation mode”, were constructed based on their genre structure and argument structure respectively. Their usability was evaluated by being compared against the existing RichHTML presentation mode in the experiments using eye-tracking and questionnaire methods.FindingsThe participants who were going to find the specific information of scientific articles rated the genre presentation mode higher than they did with either the argument or the RichHTML presentation mode for effectiveness. In contrast, those who were going to understand the general idea of scientific articles rated both the genre and argument presentation mode higher than they did with the RichHTML mode. In terms of efficiency, the participants took less reading time when the articles of non-native language were presented with the genre mode than they did when the articles were presented with the argument mode. When reading the articles in native language to understand the general idea, the participants took less reading time for the articles presented with the argument mode than they did for the articles presented with the genre mode. In comparison, they took less reading time when the articles were presented with the argument mode if they were going to find specific information. For satisfaction, the genre presentation mode was more popular than the argument mode and the RichHTML mode. However, the participants were less satisfied with the argument presentation mode than the other two when reading in native language and intending to find specific information.Originality/valueThe two presentation modes of scientific articles are found to improve the accuracy of information acquisition, shorten the total reading time and be more acceptable by readers.