Endless Possibilities v3.0

I’m going to write a series of posts on the black art of scientific publications.  I’m planning a journal based exercise for one of my classes next year and need to provide some information on what journals are and why they are.  I thought the best way to help me think about this was to write some blog posts in an attempt to get the key ideas together.  These are written from the perspective of an academic chemist, and with an educated lay audience in mind.  Comments and suggestions are welcome.

You’re probably going to need some of the information from the scientific paper at a later date.  It’s a good idea to highlight the important pieces of information, and write short comments in the margins to remind you of why they matter.  You should develop a good filing system for scientific papers so that you can find things easily when writing reports or your own papers.

If you use an experimental procedure from a paper, record the full paper reference in your laboratory book.  It may also be useful to stick in a printed copy of the important section.  When you write up that procedure, you must reference the paper.

If you plan to use the paper in an introduction, or discussion section, record the key details of the paper in your own words and note down the reference.  In general, scientists don’t quote from scientific papers unless it is something very important or controversial.  You must be able to use your own words to describe the paper, but its OK to use the same technical terms.

Invest the time in a good piece of reference management software.  There are lots of free programs available.  Expect to spend a big chunk of time installing the software and learning the basic features and commands, then small bits of time making sure that papers you find are correctly stored in it.  It is worth making the effort to note down the references of papers as you find them otherwise it is an extremely boring task to catch up on.  You can get  plug-ins for web browsers that let you store references with one click of the mouse.  If the paper is electronic, you may wish to save a copy of the PDF file for future reference.  A good file name system for this is last name of first author and year of publication.  Some people chose to add key words to the title so they know what the paper is on, some reference management software allows you to do this too.  It generally helps you to find the important papers quickly later.

I’m going to write a series of posts on the black art of scientific publications.  I’m planning a journal based exercise for one of my classes next year and need to provide some information on what journals are and why they are.  I thought the best way to help me think about this was to write some blog posts in an attempt to get the key ideas together.  These are written from the perspective of an academic chemist, and with an educated lay audience in mind.  Comments and suggestions are welcome.

So you’ve figured out your communications from your reviews, and worked out the difference between an abstract and a conclusion but its still really difficult to figure out how to read a scientific paper.  Every researcher has a different way of doing this.

Firstly, work out why you want to read the paper.  Does it have an experimental procedure in it that you want to follow?  If so, go straight to it, and then look for relevant parts of the results and discussion section that gives you more information.  You can read the rest of the paper later, but get the information you want first.  Same goes for a paper where they make a molecule you want to make.

If you’re reading papers to learn more about an area of research for a project, then you probably need to learn the vocabulary that’s used in that particular field.  Its probably easiest to look for a review article aimed at a general audience, and look up any scientific terms you are unfamiliar with.  Then, when you get to full papers, you’ll know what the terms mean and why they are used.

Sooner or later, you’re going to have to read a full paper and understand it.  Lets assume you’ve found a paper that is relevant to your project, and you know most of the specialist terms that will be used.  You can break it down into a series of questions:

1. What are the authors trying to do?  Look for a hypothesis or statement of aims of the research.
2. Why are they trying to do this? Why is this research important?
3. How are the authors trying to do it? What methods are the authors going to use.  You can also make a judgement here based on your knowledge of the field – are those methods suitable, or would you do something different?
4. Did it work?  You’ll probably have to skip to the conclusion here.  I should note that some people would say that you should go to the results section now, look at the data and draw your own conclusions as to whether it worked or not.   If you feel up to that, do it, if not, head for the conclusions.
5. What else is there?  You need to go through the results and discussion and look for anything unexpected or interesting that the authors found.  Perhaps a certain reaction always gave an unexpected result, or an analytical technique was found to be complicated and difficult to run.
6. Get critical.  You’ve already thought about whether the methods are appropriate, but now its time to think hard about the paper.  Do the results support the conclusions?  Do you understand why certain conclusions have been made?  If you were to design a series of experiments to test the hypothesis of the paper (or work through the aims), what would they be?  Would they be the same as the authors?  What would you do differently, and why?  This part is quite difficult, but often the part of the process where ideas for different work come.
7. Put the paper in context.  Look up the paper on Web of Science or some other database that tracks citations (i.e. the number of papers published after your one that reference it).  Firstly, have the authors themselves published more on the topic?  Have other researchers picked up this work and used it in their own experiments?  The number of citations a paper has from other researchers (which grows over time) is a good indication of how important or useful the work is.  Are those citations mainly from researchers working in a similar area, or are they from a wider range of research fields?