How to effectively read scientific papers?

[Endus]

I cannot imagine a more important skill for anyone in any intellectual pursuit to have than reading well.

It's definitely an important skill, but it's also an incredibly fundamental one. Professors don't have time to spend on this for the same reason they don't have time to spend teaching you how to study well, or what proper English grammar and punctuation is. They'll just give you a poor grade if you can't manage it, because those are skills you're expected to have a grasp on coming into post-secondary education.

And by "don't have time", I mean above and beyond what they already provide in sessions meant to provide support to students on precisely those subjects, and their office hours. Classroom time is limited, and needs to be focused on the actual content of the course in question, not basic reading skills. And yes, "how to read academic papers" is a "basic reading skill" at the undergrad level.

[Spectral]

It's definitely an important skill, but it's also an incredibly fundamental one. Professors don't have time to spend on this for the same reason they don't have time to spend teaching you how to study well, or what proper English grammar and punctuation is. They'll just give you a poor grade if you can't manage it, because those are skills you're expected to have a grasp on coming into post-secondary education.

And by "don't have time", I mean above and beyond what they already provide in sessions meant to provide support to students on precisely those subjects, and their office hours. Classroom time is limited, and needs to be focused on the actual content of the course in question, not basic reading skills. And yes, "how to read academic papers" is a "basic reading skill" at the undergrad level.

I've pretty much never met a freshman that could read a paper worth a shit and most first year grad students have a lot to learn about it. I have no idea where your sentiments on this topic come from. Reading papers rigorously isn't some trivial skill that people come out of high school well equipped for.

Maybe you just never learned to read them well so you think it's trivial?

[Adp]

Typically I read the abstract first and then skip down to the conclusion to figure out what their paper is trying to say. Then I go back through the experimental/supplemental information if there is one to figure out how they did it. Then read the discussion/results to see what they make of it.

Starting with the intro is usually always the wrong move. It's always 3-4 paragraphs of why they think their research is important and how it affects various things. If you're going to start writing a paper then yea that's good information to use and reference but if you're trying to do something they did then it's not worth reading.

Of course, this is coming from an organic chemist so the experimental section is always most important to me.

[Celista]

Cliffnotes.

They don't make Cliffs notes for academic journal articles. Although the abstract is similar.

[Endus]

I've pretty much never met a freshman that could read a paper worth a shit and most first year grad students have a lot to learn about it. I have no idea where your sentiments on this topic come from. Reading papers rigorously isn't some trivial skill that people come out of high school well equipped for.

Maybe you just never learned to read them well so you think it's trivial?

Ignoring the personal and pointless insult you tacked onto the back end there, the point is not that "all freshmen know this", it's that post-secondary is when you put on your big-boy or big-girl pants and grow up. Meaning if you're struggling to accomplish something, you don't throw your hands up and say "I DUNNO, I QUIT". You go attend sessions on study skills, you practice. You get better.

I've TAed a fair bit, and about half the papers I end up marking are covered in spelling mistakes and major grammar errors. Like "didn't even bother to run spellcheck" bad. Does this mean their classes should be covering remedial English? No. It means they're going to lose a bunch of points and potentially have the paper returned as ungradeable, and that poor mark is going to motivate them to make the effort to fix those errors in the future and get better. In other words, learn.

Post-secondary education isn't about holding everyone's hand and taking baby steps. It's about forging ahead and seeing who can keep up. And at the undergrad level, we're not even talking about anything particularly difficult; the vast majority of people can complete a baccalaureate. It takes dedication and focus more than raw talent.

[Nefarious Tea]

As a graduate student/researcher, I have to read a lot of scientific articles. I've always been quite terrible at it: reading a 30 pages long article I'm not familiar with can take many hours sometimes (including the time to google unknown terms and results, look through some of the referenced papers, etc.), and in the end I often remember few points from it, as the amount of information is just too big and can be presented rather chaotically. Plus, the language is usually very dry, making it hard to keep the interest and focus - more than once did I catch myself nodding off while reading the same sentence again and again, trying to understand what it means.

I'm curious what your approach to reading scientific papers is, if you do that. Are there any tricks/methods helping make this process easier? So far I've only noticed that taking notes helps a lot, as you force yourself to concentrate, when a pen is in your hand and you are writing - however, the notes get lost, and the amount of effort it takes in case of large/complicated articles is ludicrous.

So, how do you usually read articles? How effective is your approach? How much do you remember from the articles you've read a while ago? How long does it take for you to read one average-sized article?

Scientific articles are like legalese... there's literally no reason to use the vocabulary they do except for terms which are specialized and relevant to the experiment that other than to appear more intelligent. And when you're publishing scientific literature you should probably be at a level where you no longer feel the need to prove that. All it does it make it an old boys club.

[Spectral]

Ignoring the personal and pointless insult you tacked onto the back end there, the point is not that "all freshmen know this", it's that post-secondary is when you put on your big-boy or big-girl pants and grow up. Meaning if you're struggling to accomplish something, you don't throw your hands up and say "I DUNNO, I QUIT". You go attend sessions on study skills, you practice. You get better.

I've TAed a fair bit, and about half the papers I end up marking are covered in spelling mistakes and major grammar errors. Like "didn't even bother to run spellcheck" bad. Does this mean their classes should be covering remedial English? No. It means they're going to lose a bunch of points and potentially have the paper returned as ungradeable, and that poor mark is going to motivate them to make the effort to fix those errors in the future and get better. In other words, learn.

Post-secondary education isn't about holding everyone's hand and taking baby steps. It's about forging ahead and seeing who can keep up. And at the undergrad level, we're not even talking about anything particularly difficult; the vast majority of people can complete a baccalaureate. It takes dedication and focus more than raw talent.

I genuinely emphasize with the poor undergrads that ran into a TA that thought giving them a shitty grade was a good teaching method. I'm sure you were far too busy to bother actually teaching people what they were doing wrong when it comes to reading papers though.

Grammar isn't really comparable to a skill that low-year grad students struggle with, but whatever.

[Endus]

I genuinely emphasize with the poor undergrads that ran into a TA that thought giving them a shitty grade was a good teaching method. I'm sure you were far too busy to bother actually teaching people what they were doing wrong when it comes to reading papers though.

Oh noes, I'll just have to deal with my consistently glowing student assessments, to offset the fact that one person on the Internet who doesn't know me also doesn't like me. The horror.

Giving shitty grades is a good teaching method, if they deserved the shitty grade. The alternative is to give them unearned good grades to avoid hurting their feelings. I have more respect for my students than to do that. I held office hours every week and always made time for students who couldn't make them. The goal wasn't to give them bad grades, but without showing them what they've done poorly, you can't ever expect them to do any better.

[Macaquerie]

There's obviously some kind of negative feedback loop going on here. Most scientific papers are a pretty dull read and tend to be easy to put down and hard to pick back up, which means that generally people will just read the abstract and then skim the rest looking for what they need, which in turn makes authors lazy about making their papers readable since they figure nobody is going to have the patience to go through the whole thing anyway.

[Kraenen]

On this discussion above:
My profs taught me some basics on how to dissect scientific articles and how to analyze them. It wasn't the kind of thing you'd just "pick up" or have learned from high school. Part of educating the next gen of researchers and academics is teaching them how to adequately and appropriately read and analyze a piece of research. So I think it's wholly part of their job. It's also a minor part of their job, but certainly some care should be given during undergrad. Heck, lots of undergrads don't do any real critical thinking about the articles they read and use by 4th year (arguably part of the skill in reading scientific articles and NEEDED for good research). I know this from personal experience.

[hrugner]

So, how do you usually read articles? How effective is your approach? How much do you remember from the articles you've read a while ago? How long does it take for you to read one average-sized article?

Make a folder right now on your computer called "research notes" In that folder make subfolders for topics as you research them. For each article copy and paste a link to the article the publishing date and its summary in a new document and take notes as you read along. If you add a new topic, copy relevant topics into the new folders so that you have access to the new info when needed. The document name should be a one word reference that's more specific than your heading, and include the date the research was done.

You don't need to know everything, just know how to find it again.

Most of the articles you find will spend a large amount of space telling you how to reproduce their experiment. You can skip that once you're confident in the method. They will also tell you how to replicate their math and how they generated their charts, make sure their graphics represent their research, but you don't need a line by line reading. You can also skip their conclusion for the most part. "We found what you see in the results, but we're not confident on xyz and need further research", there, you're good to go. Just remember it's reference material, and all of it is relevant to someone, but most of it won't be relevant to you.

Work on the new terms and learn them, take an etymology, Latin, or linguistics class to get a handle on those problems. Also, skip over anything with mushy or emotionally evocative abstracts. It isn't worth your time.

My reading time is pretty long, I don't expect to get through more than three a day. I remember them pretty much forever as far as I can tell, though I don't remember them perfectly and rely heavily on notes. If someone corrects you, check, science changes quickly and it's possible one or both of you are working from outdated information. Or hell, you could have read something wrong, it happens.