COLUMBUS, Ohio — An eight-month investigation into the reading practices of Derrick Foulham, 41, a supply-chain consultant who describes himself to colleagues as "someone who really does the reading," has concluded that Foulham does, in fact, do the reading — specifically, the part of the reading that occurs before the first subheading.

The inquiry, conducted by the Center for Applied Reading Behavior and Paragraph Completion Studies at the University of Greater Columbus Annex, found that Foulham had formed "confident, detailed, and occasionally aggressive" opinions on topics ranging from monetary policy to deep-sea mycology, based on an average of 47 words of sourced text per subject.

"What we observed was less a reading habit than a form of intellectual contact sport," said Dr. Penelope Vreeth, the center's Associate Director of First-Impression Epistemology. "Mr. Foulham engages with the lede, absorbs the thesis sentence, and then — and this is the remarkable part — he stops. He simply stops. And then he talks about it at dinner."

Foulham's browser history, reviewed with his consent after he agreed that he "had nothing to hide because he follows everything," revealed 4,214 open tabs, the vast majority scrolled to a position researchers described as "the exact bottom of the first paragraph, no further."

In seventeen documented cases, Foulham had shared articles on social media with the caption "This is why I've been saying this for years," having read only the publication's name, the headline, and a sentence beginning with the word "Researchers."

"I'm a big believer in getting the gist. If the writer is doing their job, the gist is all up front. Everything after that is basically for people who have more time than me, which, frankly, is a character flaw."

Foulham, who owns four physical books — all of which have a bookmark placed between pages eight and nine — says he sees no contradiction between his self-assessment and the evidence. "I've read pieces in The Atlantic, The Economist, Nature, and I want to say some kind of Harvard thing," he said in an interview. "That's not nothing."

Dr. Vreeth's team noted that Foulham's opinions are, in several cases, consistent with what a full reading of the articles would have produced, which she called "a statistical phenomenon we are still working to explain, and also a little depressing."

The study also identified what researchers termed the "confident pivot," in which Foulham, upon meeting someone who has read an article in full, successfully redirects the conversation to a different article of which he has also read only the first paragraph.

Foulham said he plans to read the full report on his habits "once someone writes a good summary of it," adding that he had already skimmed the abstract and felt he "pretty much had it."

The investigation is ongoing. Researchers say they hope to determine, before the year is out, whether Foulham has ever read a footnote. Current projections are not optimistic.