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Thread: Learning to read the research

  1. #1

    Default Learning to read the research

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    I want to learn to better read and understand published studies but I do not have a formal (READ: University) science background. Therefore, I am in the market for a book or books on the subject and came across this. Could and would you suggest any other books on the subject?

    Thank you in advanced.

  2. #2
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    I don't know that there is a book that deals with this topic. The relevant stuff is experience with reading studies and thinking.

  3. #3
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    As a current Bio student and one who has had to read numerous papers for my independent lab work, I think it all comes down to practice and asking questions.

  4. #4
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    I agree with the above, it really just takes brain work and experience. if you want to become really good at it, I'd suggest a research methods text in biology / medicine, it's not my field so I wouldn't know which to recommend.

  5. #5
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    When you say you don't have a formal science background, how little of a science background are we talking? Do you have at least a vague idea about how science is done? Do you know what cells are? Do you know what a gene is? Do you know what a correlation is? If you know basic biology, have a good idea about what it means to test a scientific hypothesis, and have a crude understanding of statistics, that may be enough to start. If you don't, well, which one of those three is giving you the most trouble?

  6. #6
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    I think you need a little more than a crude understanding of statistics, as "sadistics" can be gamed by almost anybody. As a reviewer for scientific journals (i.e., earth science) I think that you need to have a decent handle on statistics, as well as a fundamental understanding of theory and the governing laws behind the science. If you mix this with empirical knowledge and critical thinking, you can separate good science from the bad.

  7. #7
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    Just remember a few things about biomedical research, especially when reading about observational or epidemiologic studies: association or correlation between two variables does not prove causation; you can only generate a hypothesis about what is going on between those variables. In order to see if the hypothesis actually holds up or not, you have to do an experiment or trial and rigorously control the variables except for the ones you are studying.

  8. #8

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    Quote Originally Posted by Drewcar View Post
    I think you need a little more than a crude understanding of statistics, as "sadistics" can be gamed by almost anybody.
    I think this is what I was/am getting at. I tooled around on Google Scholar for an hour or so last night, and while I understand the basics of conducting and designing a study (control groups, etc.), I noticed that I got most hung up on the intricacies of covariance and establishing significance. It looks like I have a stats class in my future.

  9. #9
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    I did a biomedical graduate degree (before branching out to software interface design) and I remember an incident where I was making copies of articles in the department office, one afternoon, early in my studies. There were a lot of articles and it was for a focused presentation, so I was just copying the most relevant parts of various articles - neglecting especially the pages-long endnotes referring to cited literature. The chairman of the department somehow noticed my abbreviated copies and took the time to explain to me that the references were in many ways the MOST important part of the articles. Years more experience with such things taught me that this was a very important insight. You can read and make sense of the scientific literature, but you will probably need access to a university library (many of the journals are not easily, or freely, available online) because you will need to follow an idea through it's web of citations in order to really get it. In fact, space in many journals is quite cramped and it leads to a way of describing things that is quite concentrated and filled with references to some other publication where the thing being discussed (a process, a result, etc) has already been described. With Wikipedia (for basic concept descriptions) a lot of patience and access to the journals, you can make a lot of progress by playing detective with the citations as your clues.

    Another thing to realize is that every discipline has a pretty strict hierarchy of journals -- and you can judge quality pretty straight-forwardly based on which rung of the desired journals the article is published in (they are the journals that folks publish in if their work is judged as good enough and/or novel enough). So, if you read something in Nature, or Science or Cell - even if it at first seems impenetrable, you can pretty much bet that it's of a very high quality and worth struggling with to sort out. On the other hand, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) is a bit like a grab bag -- not necessarily bad, but that's where things get published that aren't good or complete or novel enough for the other journals. There can be a thousand reasons why something isn't in the major journals (and they aren't infallible, themselves) and it definitely does not mean they are crap, you just have to be careful of them. For someone who hasn't played in these waters much, anything that is actually *published* takes on an air of authority that it often does not deserve.

    So, get access, give preference to the top journals and spend time building a collection of the literature regarding an idea that interests you by following the citations and you can definitely make progress without going back to school. Oh, one more important note: REFERENCE LIBRARIANS. That is to say, specifically those librarians who hang out at the reference desk -- they know this stuff and can help a HUGE amount in making your way amongst the various databases and giving you the lay of the land with respect to the reputation of various journals, etc. People are shy in the library about talking to the folks that have made navigating information their profession. One thing the pressures of a graduate program does for you is help you overcome this shyness.

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