21–30 of 63 posts
I love how simple and clear this post is. As a kind of weird aside, if anyone ever emailed me about any of my journal articles, I would 100% respond to them (assuming they weren't a machine). I think most of my colleagues would do the same (except for articles featured in a newspaper, which might garner a lot of weird emails).
Sensible advice overall, but I completely disagree with these: > Before you begin reading, take note of the authors and their institutional affiliations. and > Beware of questionable journals. Institutional affiliation and journal imprimatur should have no bearing in science. These are shortcuts for the lazy, and they introduce bias into evaluation of the paper's contents. Even more than that, dispensing advice along…
They aren't shortcuts for the lazy, they're shortcuts for non-scientists who aren't capable of fully evaluating the science alone. If you're capable of objectively peer reviewing a paper, you're not the audience of this article.
It's a shortcut fraught with potential for deception, as even a casual glance through a site like Retraction Watch will demonstrate:
I'm not sure what you mean by "evaluating the science." A scientific paper should present a hypothesis, the author's best attempt to disprove the hypothesis, and an interpretation of the evidence gathered in the processes of testing the hypothesis. There's going to be a back-story, and it's likely to be quite involved.
The article does a good job of presenting a method for navigating a paper on this basis. I don't see what checking credentials adds to the process. On the contrary, it may do harm.
I usually first start reading or glance over papers (and non-story books) from the end to the beginning before I read it the other way around. This has the following benefits for me: - By knowing about the conclusion first I will better understand the motivation and why certain steps are being taken. - I find out sooner if the paper (or book) is something I am looking for. I like to read papers unrelated to my field…
Then I do ctrl-F "blind" (can't find it), ctrl-F "significance" (see p-value with nearby text indicating it has been misinterpreted). Boom, paper done in under a minute. There is really no reason to study such papers unless they have some very specific information you are searching for (like division rate of a certain cell line or something).
There is a difference between reading and studying a paper. Many papers I just check the abstract for claims of A causes/correlates B (ie it is a "headline" claim), and look for a scatter plot of A vs B (it is missing). Then I do ctrl-F "blind" (can't find it), ctrl-F "significance" (see p-value with nearby text indicating it has been misinterpreted). Boom, paper done in under a minute. There is really no reason to s…
"This means that if the experiment suggests that the probability of a chance event in the experiment is less than this critical value, then the null hypothesis can be rejected." https://explorable.com/statistical-hypothesis-testing
There is a difference between reading and studying a paper. Many papers I just check the abstract for claims of A causes/correlates B (ie it is a "headline" claim), and look for a scatter plot of A vs B (it is missing). Then I do ctrl-F "blind" (can't find it), ctrl-F "significance" (see p-value with nearby text indicating it has been misinterpreted). Boom, paper done in under a minute. There is really no reason to s…
Why don't the authors do these 11 steps for us?
Because they are not writing for non-scientists.
Look, I get that there's some natural professional context and lingo that goes into these things, but for all the angst that goes into what esteem that population at large holds up the science community
making their work more accessible to both novices and interested outsiders would be a nice step in the right direction