This suggestion by Michael Nielsen is also very good: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=666615
How to read and understand a scientific paper: a guide for non-scientists
51–60 of 63 posts
Re: How to read and understand a scientific paper: a guide for non-scientists
#52A couple things I try to do when reading research papers, inspired by these two amazing [b|v]logs.
[1]https://blog.acolyer.org/
[2]https://www.youtube.com/user/keeroyz
I try to paraphrase the paper into a Acolyer like 'morning paper' blog post on evernote while mentally I am directing a 'two minute paper' video on the paper :)
Re: How to read and understand a scientific paper: a guide for non-scientists
#53There 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…
The importance you place on the presence of a p-value suggests that you're probably not the best judge of whether a p-value is correctly interpreted.
I'm not sure what you mean. You think it is unimportant if people do not understand the tools they use to draw conclusions from their data? The presence of the misunderstood p-value is just the easiest, most obvious heuristic for "authors and/or reviewers do not know how to analyze their data".
Re: How to read and understand a scientific paper: a guide for non-scientists
#54I have a little "hack" that I find extremely helpful for getting a sense of specific research fields. Journal articles, even review papers, are cramped for space and so tend to be very dense. The author suggests methods for doing battle with this density, but I suggest that, before doing that, you search for a class of document that's allowed to be as expansive as the author desires, and whose authors have recently s…
This is very good advice. I am a PhD student in mathematics, and every time I try to learn a new area of math, I'm grateful when I stumble upon PhD theses about that topic. They actually include their calculations.
Re: How to read and understand a scientific paper: a guide for non-scientists
#55I don't understand the opposition to abstracts: dense means high information content, so if you know the field you can learn a whole lot (like whether you should read this paper or another one).
Abstracts often are misleading. They're useful to decide whether you should read this paper or another one, but they're often not useful to get a summary of what exactly the paper actually achieves. Often the abstract will imply a more interesting result by leaving out key aspects and limitations (which are detailed in the paper and its conclusions) that significantly change the impact of the paper, the abstract ofte…
I recently read a paper whose abstract seemed to imply to me that its content was much more technical and specific than it actually turned out to be, which was disappointing. It was more useful in telling you the particular area of research than summarising its content.
Re: How to read and understand a scientific paper: a guide for non-scientists
#56I have a little "hack" that I find extremely helpful for getting a sense of specific research fields. Journal articles, even review papers, are cramped for space and so tend to be very dense. The author suggests methods for doing battle with this density, but I suggest that, before doing that, you search for a class of document that's allowed to be as expansive as the author desires, and whose authors have recently s…
This is very good advice. I am a PhD student in mathematics, and every time I try to learn a new area of math, I'm grateful when I stumble upon PhD theses about that topic. They actually include their calculations.
Yeah, and if you are actually in the field and trying to learn it (as you are and this article's intended audience is not), a nice little bonus is that PhD theses are usually formatted in a way that's very friendly to markin' 'em up as you come to grips with the material.
Re: How to read and understand a scientific paper: a guide for non-scientists
#57Why don't the authors do these 11 steps for us?
In addition to reasons stated: some journals (or academic disciplines) expressly reject clarifying content within papers. Listing of variables used in equations is one specific example that's been mentioned to me by Joerg Fliege, an academic himself, at G+.
(His "Academia, Schmacademia" collection is very highly recommended.)
Re: How to read and understand a scientific paper: a guide for non-scientists
#58This is a good guide, but I will tell you a trick that is faster, easier, and more effective: read 2 or 3 papers. All that effort you would put into doing these steps? Instead, read 1 or 2 other papers that the author refers to in the beginning. Science is a conversation. When you read the other papers, even if you don't understand them at first, you will get a sense of the conversation. Also, some writers are abysma…
There is a huge variety in the quality of writing in scientific papers, but most of it is bad, or at least totally opaque, so I'm not sure that 3 papers will give you a sense of what is good, or even have a high probability of containing a paper that you can use as an entry point, although I think your premise is correct. Probably the best evidence that a paper is a good entry point is whether or not the author cared…
Personally I find abstracts close to useless, and just skip them entirely. I’ve never found a particularly close correlation between what an abstract said and how interesting/informative/well written the rest of the paper was. YMMV.
Re: How to read and understand a scientific paper: a guide for non-scientists
#59>I want to help people become more scientifically literate, so I wrote this guide for how a layperson can approach reading and understanding a scientific research paper. It’s appropriate for someone who has no background whatsoever in science or medicine, and based on the assumption that he or she is doing this for the purpose of getting a basic understanding of a paper and deciding whether or not it’s a reputable study.
Better advice intended to make layman with zero background in science become more scientifically literate would be to tell them to read some textbooks.
Later on in the article, she tells people to write down each and every thing you don't understand in an article and look them up later. And this is excellent advice for people with a background equivalent to an advanced undergraduate or higher, but for people with zero background it would be better to read some textbooks and get yourself a foundation.
Honestly, even when I was in grad school in neuroscience, I asked around for advice on reading papers and the surprisingly universal response from other grad students was that it took 2 years to become reliably able to read and evaluate a research paper well. And this is 2 years in a research environment with often weekly reading groups where PIs, postdocs, grad students, and some undergrads got together to dissect some paper. These reading groups provided an environment in which you had regular feedback on your own ability to read papers by seeing all the things those more experienced than you saw and that you missed. A paper that took me 3+ hours of intense study would take a postdoc a good half hour to get more information out of.
I feel like this article makes reading articles well seem a lighter undertaking than it really is. It's really no wonder we see studies misinterpreted so often on the internet, where people Google for 5 minutes and skim an abstract.
Re: How to read and understand a scientific paper: a guide for non-scientists
#60>I want to help people become more scientifically literate, so I wrote this guide for how a layperson can approach reading and understanding a scientific research paper. It’s appropriate for someone who has no background whatsoever in science or medicine, and based on the assumption that he or she is doing this for the purpose of getting a basic understanding of a paper and deciding whether or not it’s a reputable st…
> it took 2 years to become reliably able to read and evaluate a research paper well
This completely coincides with my experience. When I started grad school, it took me a few hours to read one paper, and I probably understood only 50% of the materials even though I had some foundations in the research area from my undergrad studies.
Reading textbooks is a great advice. Then one can start reading some review papers in the area to get some more depth in his/her knowledge. I think the difficulty is that it is hard to find good textbooks and review papers for the subject that one is interested in, especially when the subject is in a niche field.