🧪 How I read scientific papers without crying
While I was in school, I got spoon-fed everything I needed to know by profs who packaged knowledge into nice lecture-sized nuggets.
The problem?
Spoon-feeding stops after graduation. And science moves fast fast. So six months post-grad, fresh outta school, I felt behind the times. To keep up, I had to learn on my own.
Except I had no idea how to consume the currency of new information: research papers.
So I spent the next two years reading hundreds of primary research articles. Here's the tldr on how to read a paper:
- Skip the abstract.
- Skim the intro for words/phrases relevant to what you need to know.
- If you need more background information, go to Perplexity.ai. Give it a prompt like: "Summarize the pathophysiology age-related macular degeneration."
- Go back to your paper. Read the abstract. Summarize the paper's main methods and main findings by filling in these blanks:
"The authors used ______ and _______ to show _______."
Ex: The authors used a double blind prospective study to show drug A works better than drug B.
This sentence is going to be your north star. When you get lost, come back to this sentence.
- If unfamiliar with the main methods used, go to YouTube and watch a couple summary videos.
- Go to the results section. Read the subheadings. Get a feel for the flow of ideas. Each subheading should build on the last (If a paper is written well, this will be easy). Does it make logical sense?
- Dive into the experiments under each subheading. For each experiment, ask yourself: what question does this experiment answer? Does this experiment support their main claim? (Refer to the summary sentence you wrote earlier).
- Look at the corresponding figures. Think: do these results make sense? The authors say drug A caused a huge difference - can I appreciate this in the data? Am I convinced?
- If the paper was written well, read the discussion section. (Hopefully, the authors discussed limitations of the study and future directions). Otherwise, skip it.
If you take one thing away from this post: Make sure you understand how something was done before you choose to believe it.
This is doubly true if you're going to apply what you learned to treating patients.
✍️ I tried to keep this short, but if you're interested in a detailed guide on this topic (with examples), drop a line below!
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-Jin
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