3 ms·

> Review articles are good, but I still recommend starting with textbooks before moving on to reviews. We are agreed on that. I shouldn't have said "out of dat

by cgiles 7y ago

> Review articles are good, but I still recommend starting with textbooks before moving on to reviews. We are agreed on that. I shouldn't have said "out of date", which suggests what is in those books is invalid. What I should have said is "they don't really cover topics that are new or controversial and mostly only cover fundamentals". In reality as you know each new edition of those books is 95% or more identical to the previous edition. The only downside to this approach is that if people are interested in a particular topic like cell senescence, it's a bit harsh to say "go read these 5 textbooks that may have 2 pages on the subject before you even start looking into the topic you're interested in". And the Biology of Cancer? I'm published on several cell senescence papers and don't know jack about cancer. I own the book and skimmed it though. I think Hallmarks of Cancer review is a much better introduction than this tome. The other two are good fundamentals books though. For aging I recommend Handbook of the Biology of Aging. FWIW, I do not know a single PhD student that read those books cover-to-cover. In most of my grad school classes you weren't even required to buy the textbook and they were barely used. Actually in grad school I never bought a single textbook for classes, although I did get some for personal use.

pgeorgi 7y ago
> and mostly only cover fundamentals I consider that a feature when entering a new field. Once I have the fundamentals, it's much easier to read a paper and have at least a rough idea if it's a crackpot theory or the real deal. Without the fundamentals? No clue.
- cgiles 7y ago
  The easy way around this is to find out what journal the article was published in and look at its impact factor. If the impact factor is below 2, ignore it. If it is between 3 and 10, it is probably legit although it may not be the majority viewpoint in the field. If it is above 10, then either the article is written by a very important person in the field, or it is considered to be potentially high-impact but may be wrong. Alternatively very massive consortium experiments are published in high-impact journals as a matter of course. It is best to stick to the 3 to 10 range though until you know the ins and outs. Lots of Nature papers look exciting and turn out to be wrong. This is a rough guideline that varies by field. PLoS One is a journal that publishes anything but has a decent impact factor so it is an exception to this rule. There are a few others but it generally holds true.

by cgiles 7y ago

pgeorgi 7y ago

> and mostly only cover fundamentals I consider that a feature when entering a new field. Once I have the fundamentals, it's much easier to read a paper and have at least a rough idea if it's a crackpot theory or the real deal. Without the fundamentals? No clue.

cgiles 7y ago
The easy way around this is to find out what journal the article was published in and look at its impact factor. If the impact factor is below 2, ignore it. If it is between 3 and 10, it is probably legit although it may not be the majority viewpoint in the field. If it is above 10, then either the article is written by a very important person in the field, or it is considered to be potentially high-impact but may be wrong. Alternatively very massive consortium experiments are published in high-impact journals as a matter of course. It is best to stick to the 3 to 10 range though until you know the ins and outs. Lots of Nature papers look exciting and turn out to be wrong. This is a rough guideline that varies by field. PLoS One is a journal that publishes anything but has a decent impact factor so it is an exception to this rule. There are a few others but it generally holds true.