>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 resear

>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.