by CHAD ORZEL
My course this term is on time and timekeeping, but is also intended as a general “research methods” class. This was conceived by people in the humanities, where the idea of generic research methods makes a lot more sense than in the sciences (where there’s a lot more specialization by subfield), but I’m going to try to give as general an overview of how to approach scientific research as possible in a course with no prerequisites. The following is sort of a rough sketch of a lecture for next week, on how to approach the scientific literature, so comments and suggestions are welcome. This is intended to be in somewhat the same spirit as Timothy Burke’s excellent How to Read in College. This will also be slanted toward the physics side of things, because that’s the part of academic science I know best.
So, you find yourself in a situation where you need to read a scientific paper for some reason, and you want to know the most efficient way to do this. You could, of course, start at the beginning, and read straight through to the end, but that takes a long time, and might require reading a lot of irrelevant material. With a little basic knowledge of how scientific papers work, though, you can do this much more efficiently. The following steps are intended as a guide to make your reading more effective.
STEP ZERO: Know what you want. Before doing anything else, make sure you know what it is you hope to get out of this paper, because that will dramatically change how you read it. Are you looking for a specific number to plug into a calculation of your own? A sense of a broad research field? The details of a measurement technique? A way to poke holes in a result that disagrees with your pet theory? Those different types of information show up in different places, and that shapes and directs your reading. Make sure you know what sort of thing you’re looking for.
STEP ONE: Know the structure. The base structure of a scientific paper is more or less the format we require for labs in our introductory classes: There’s an Abstract, and Introduction, the Procedure, the Results, and the Conclusion. The problem is, about the only place you are guaranteed to find that structure clearly laid out and rigidly followed is in a lab report written for an introductory class. Real scientific papers, particularly those written for more prestigious journals (Science, Nature, Physical Review Letters) will often mix sections together, or repeat bits of the structure, several times through the course of the paper. Knowing the base structure gives you an idea where to look, and how to orient yourself when you dive into the middle of a text.
The Abstract of a scientific paper is a one-paragraph (usually) summary of the main points of the article. You can think of this as sort of like the “Attention conservation notice” Cosma Shalizi puts at the start of his longer posts: it’s there so you know what to expect the article to contain, and reading it should tell you whether you want to read the paper or not.
Uncertain Principles for more