Still waiting for an open discussion forum for scientific papers. Like StackOverflow, but every post is a paper. And there are experts of various gradations that help with questions.
I think this is what https://pubpeer.com/ wants to be
How to (seriously) read a scientific paper (2016)
51–60 of 66 posts
Re: How to (seriously) read a scientific paper (2016)
#52I see a lot of people who basically skip to the figures, and take them at face value, and read nothing more about the paper. When I read a paper I start with the abstract and go to the methods. then I inspect the figures carefully for the common tricks scientists play- axes tricks, overfitting, etc, looking to see whether I'm c onvinced the figures actually came from running an experiment, or just from copying and pa…
What do you generally look for in the Methods section?
Re: How to (seriously) read a scientific paper (2016)
#53I see a lot of people who basically skip to the figures, and take them at face value, and read nothing more about the paper. When I read a paper I start with the abstract and go to the methods. then I inspect the figures carefully for the common tricks scientists play- axes tricks, overfitting, etc, looking to see whether I'm c onvinced the figures actually came from running an experiment, or just from copying and pa…
What do you generally look for in the Methods section?
Specific details about how the data collection and processing was done. For example in my field there were a lot of fussy details that if they were not handled correctly (and most people did not handle them correctly) would lead to false positives/false negatives.
If something is outside my area of expertise, then I have limited ability to judge a paper based on its methods.
Re: How to (seriously) read a scientific paper (2016)
#54Complementary: How to Write a Paper (University of Cambridge)
http://www-mech.eng.cam.ac.uk/mmd/ashby-paper-V6.pdf
Re: How to (seriously) read a scientific paper (2016)
#55You'll note that the people in this thread who claim to have higher levels of expertise reads the Methods section pretty closely.
For the scientifically-interested public this is where it can all go wrong since we lack the background to properly assess the methods since we've never done it before.
Once we've gone through a paper and it all seems reasonable to us, we have to really seek out expert opinion on the methods and see what critiques are out there--we're not going to be able to judge the paper's methods in a relative vacuum of actual experience.
Re: How to (seriously) read a scientific paper (2016)
#56This misses the best skimming trick I learned from an advisor: After you read the abstract, read the last couple lines/paragraphs of the introduction. That's where you'll find the authors best summary of the paper's contributions and novelty. For instance, the first paper that popped up with some random search terms [0]: The present paper attempts to provide a structured and comprehensive overview of state-of-the-art…
In the early-2010s, computer vision papers started putting a bulleted summary of that paper’s contributions at the end of the intro. It’s an enormously helpful (and fairly recent) invention. I’ve been insisting on using that pattern in the papers I write since, not just because it helps readers understand the key ideas better, but because it also forces authors to clarify the main points to themselves.
That train's probably gone with the rise of LLMs? As in, in 2020s it would be more than often just delegated to the chatbot and called quits. At least that's my thought.
Re: How to (seriously) read a scientific paper (2016)
#57Still waiting for an open discussion forum for scientific papers. Like StackOverflow, but every post is a paper. And there are experts of various gradations that help with questions.
Better yet (IMHO), like HN. In my field, I know where to find papers, etc. I'm interested in other fields, and not every paper; just rank them by a HN-like algorithm. I said a few days ago, in my dream HN would be mostly papers. That's where the richest, most accurate, most intellectually curious information is - far beyond most things on HN.
most of the most intellectually curious things I've ever seen on the Internet were not research papers so I don't know how you can make that claim.
Re: How to (seriously) read a scientific paper (2016)
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Better yet (IMHO), like HN. In my field, I know where to find papers, etc. I'm interested in other fields, and not every paper; just rank them by a HN-like algorithm. I said a few days ago, in my dream HN would be mostly papers. That's where the richest, most accurate, most intellectually curious information is - far beyond most things on HN.
most of the most intellectually curious things I've ever seen on the Internet were not research papers so I don't know how you can make that claim.
It's a matter of opinion, of course.
But what are you reading? I'm very interested in finding more and better!
I find research papers to be an order of magnitude richer, more accurate, more thoughtful than almost anything else. Everything else is too slow and doesn't answer most of the questions I have. Research papers (and books) not only answer the questions, they take me much further than what I knew existed - what I'd hope for from experts.
Re: How to (seriously) read a scientific paper (2016)
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Alas, I believe you two are not communicating! Marcia McNutt, the (now former) editor-in-chief of Science , was certainly talking about the News section of Science magazine, the magazine of the AAAS. That is, McNutt is talking about: https://www.science.org/news This is not the same as "Science News" -- https://www.sciencenews.org/sn-magazine The reason I think this is that the next sentence refers to a "Perspective"…
It isn't a "callow dismissal". I'm talking about science.org/news, just like you. It's written by career journalists [1]. It's fine for toilet reading. And as far as credentialism goes...I don't care if McNutt is the Nobel-winning reincarnation of Carl Sagan. She's literally saying that her go-to for reviewing any new paper submitted to Science is to look at the work of journalists , to see if the article is notewort…
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Re: How to (seriously) read a scientific paper (2016)
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
most of the most intellectually curious things I've ever seen on the Internet were not research papers so I don't know how you can make that claim.
It's a matter of opinion, of course. But what are you reading? I'm very interested in finding more and better! I find research papers to be an order of magnitude richer, more accurate, more thoughtful than almost anything else. Everything else is too slow and doesn't answer most of the questions I have. Research papers (and books) not only answer the questions, they take me much further than what I knew existed - wha…
I think limiting yourself to research papers alone will deprieve you of ideas which are just developing, which may not have an official body of research or even any published papers about. Ideas we as a society or culture might only beginning to tackle.
I find the discussion around a thing to be sometimes more interesting than the thing itself - a research paper might spark way more interesting discussions than the paper itself.
Take the "Attention Is All You Need" paper. How many have actually read it vs. how much has been written about it, or about the things it led to?
There is a lot packed into those 10 pages, but I've found the thousands of discussions around transformers and GPT to be way more interesting.