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Even when I was in grad school (sadly a while ago), it was understood that to really understand the validity of a paper, you needed to look at its conclusion an
by Karrot_Kream 3y ago
Even when I was in grad school (sadly a while ago), it was understood that to really understand the validity of a paper, you needed to look at its conclusion and methods sections. Generally speaking the abstract was just used as a filter. It helped you answer the question of whether the paper was even worth taking a look at or not. Then you mined the conclusion and methods to see if they supported what you were looking for. Only then did you read the paper in detail.
As you say there's a pretty big gap with the way researchers read through papers and the way the science media communicate about research with laypeople. It's a hard problem that needs more attention than it gets.
(Probably one of the most useful classes I took in grad school was a class in the beginning that forced us to read 10 papers a week and write summaries. The class was hell as obviously there was no way to properly understand each paper on top of your research and other classes. But it made us great at being able to quickly winnow papers for the meat of each paper and also made us great at finding papers with... dubious methods.)
- sockaddr 3y agoYup. I often will read something like "A connection between X and Y" Then skim down to the conclusion and it will say "In conclusion, we were only able to see some weak connection and we aren't sure if it was one at all, but this warrants further research..." I know negative results are still valuable science, but I feel like a good chunk of the papers I'm reading are basically worthless CV padding.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Terr_ 3y agoWhile it focuses a bit more on pop-culture, a relevant comic on "the science news-cycle": https://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174 https://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174
- mistrial9 3y agohah - I was with you until the "ten papers a week" part. You say it yourself, there are parts to the paper, and also levels of concentration and re-reads. Drilling is useful for hyperactive monkey minds who are doing something else instead of studying
- Karrot_Kream 3y agoIt was an "intro to grad school" type class. The point was simply to build endurance. They made very clear in the class that there was no way we were going to absorb the depth of the papers and told us to bound the amount of time we spent on it clearly so that we don't kill ourselves over it. I like to think of it as marathon practice or breathing practice for folks who played woodwinds; it was just helping us get into the muscle of winnowing papers effectively.