How to Read a Scientific Article (AKA THE MOST USEFUL THING I LEARNED IN COLLEGE) ELIZABETH MARTIN

What order do you normally read it in?  The order it’s written?  I don’t read the article, just the abstract  I don’t read the article or the abstract, just the title

What does the title tell you?

The title should give you “broad strokes”

What does the abstract tell you?

The abstract is the Twitter version of the article

Why should you read more than just the abstract?

 While it gives the gist of the paper, it doesn’t cover details  It also doesn’t tell you why it’s important or relevant to you  It doesn’t tell you how they did what the did (unless it’s a methods paper)  It doesn’t explain the findings well, it just tells you what you found.

So What happens if we read it in order? Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion

Introduction This part is pretty easy to read through…. I think I can handle this!

The ever confusing methods section What does this even mean?

I Give Up!

What happens if we read in a different order?  Introduction  Why should you care about what is going to be talked about?  What is the context of the problem we are discussing?  Discussion  What are the potential implications of what was discovered?  What is the context of what was discovered?  Results  What specifically did we find?  Methods  How did we find this out?

Why should you read the methods? (Even if it’s terrible torture)  Because sometimes people misrepresent (intentionally or unintentionally) what they did!  It is your job to catch it whether it be a bad measurement of exposure, poor experimental design, etc.  But just because it is questionable doesn’t necessarily mean it’s wrong, you just have to interpret the results more cautiously!

Open Access Journals  Directory of Open Access Journals   Plos1   Environmental Health Perspectives   Toxicological Sciences  -- Not everything  Nature and Science both have some open access articles (after 12 months?)