Ask your PhDs if they have a journal club, they'll translate the jargon to you and you'll develop decent pattern matching. Read the conclusion before the "Resu

Ask your PhDs if they have a journal club, they'll translate the jargon to you and you'll develop decent pattern matching. Read the conclusion before the "Results" section. In fact, read the "results" section last. Read review papers, they are way less bad. In addition they tend to comment on the source papers clearly enough that you can use them as a reading guide. Same goes for theses, but only if they're any good, so review papers work better. Pick a good review journal (impact factor is a decent proxy). Email the author of a paper if you have a specific question (on the methods, what a result means, why they chose to put some data in supplementary and some in the paper, etc). Usually it works and they don't actually write emails in academese. Always write to the corresponding author not necessarily the PI. If you want to write papers and not merely read them, reading them is the first step so do the above first, and then loosely parrot what you've seen in the wild with some technical term mad libs thrown in.