For example: say I want to find out about using bright light therapy to attenuate afternoon energy dips… How would you approach such an inquiry
Some of the best advice I got on this was from a psychology professor. She said essentially:
Just keep going when you encounter terms or stuff you don’t understand. Just keep reading more and more papers.
Write down or highlight the terms you don’t know, but don’t stop to look them up. Just keep going. Later on you can look those terms up and then re-read them.
But don’t stop in real time. Just keep reading more and more.
Universities and maybe colleges offer courses on how to do scientific research. It’s part of academic study to learn how to find information and also judge it. Maybe you can find one of those courses? Or at least the literature they use… Other than that there are databases, libraries, journals, Google Scholar, …
Can you give me a workflow you’d use to pursue such a question based on the details I gave?
The previous commentor already did that.
Assuming that you don’t have enough information on the topics that you want to learn about to even begin this journey without asking for guided help, then the place you need to start is understanding research methodologies.
There are plenty of free online resources that can teach you those skills for free. I am partial to MITs Open Course Work, but many universities offer comparable services.
I think properly looking for texts is called “Literature research”. I’d go to the local library and ask the person at the desk. They probably studied being a librarian. They’ll either recommend you a book, or happen to have a yearly course in the library.
Second possibility: Ask a friend who did a masters degree if they can give you their lecture notes. I think my university of applied science has one book with several chapters on that. (It’s in German so I can’t really recommend it here.)
Third possibility: Find online material on “literature research”. Google it, look at links on wikipedia. There might be online courses, paid or unpaid. And some big universities have some of their lectures available to the public.
I’d probably get a book. I think that’s a great way to learn things. Usually they’ve been written by smart people. And you can read them at your pace. Whatever that is in a given day.
Well, if you’re asking cause you want to apply it in the real world, then you should not rely on just one or a few studies in the literature.
Maybe ask a MD?
I echo this. I can read papers in a variety of fields and understand what they’re doing and finding, but it takes expertise in that particular field or with the techniques used to really understand the flaws and limitations. Individual studies are often inadequate and sometimes wrong. I would stick to looking at review articles to get a better idea of what is happening in a field in context.
Google scholar is probably your best starting point. Just throw in the search terms you are interested in and start clicking and reading. Its free, and is a pretty complete archive.
The biggest issue you’ll get into is that many papers are behind paywalls.
To get around that (and you morally should) you have two options.
Step one option a:
The first and easier is to go onto scihub and see if someone has uploaded the paper: https://www.sci-hub.st/
Step one option b:
The second is to make an account on research gate, track down one of the authors, and just straight up ask them for a copy. They’ll almost always send it to you. If you can’t find them on research gate, just throw their name into the google and they might have a lab or professional email you can track down.
Step two:
In terms of how to comprehend? My recommendation, if the paper is English language, is to start in the upper left corner of the first page, and read from left to right in a clockwise descending manner one line at a time, until you get to the lower right corner of the page. This can vary depending on the number of columns on the page, but will generally work. If there are any sections you don’t understand, all scientific papers will have citations you can look up to get further explanation on a given subject. For each citation repeat steps one and two. Continue this process recursively until you comprehend the material.
And the point of the last couple of lines really is the point. There is no replacement for comprehension and understanding other than to read the material over and over again, to look up what its referencing, and to keep trying and working on it and digging until you do get it. You can find some youtube videos and lectures for some understanding, but even these aren’t replacements for the conversation which is what actual publications represent.
Its work to understand research.
I would add to this libmaps, great resource to put the title of your document and it maps the paper, from where it is cited to whom cites the paper that has more up to date research. Then if the paper isn’t available use my friend above’s method to access the papers
Also Ai is your friend in interpreting and summarising the paper, but be careful it isn’t perfect
MMmm.
No. Don’t do this unless you want wildly wrong results. Summarizing a scientific paper and extracting its key conclusions using a GPT is not a trivial thing. It might work for faking your way through an undergraduate level project, but its fundamentally antagonistic towards developing real understanding. There is no replacement for just reading the paper and its citations until you understand it. Even if a GPT can summarize a scientific paper (and I have volumes of data to show they can’t with out significant guard rails) reading or memorizing “just the conclusions” is a great way to fool yourself and others into thinking you understand something. You have not done the thing if you do only this thing. If you want to truly understand it, there are no shortcuts.
Is there a way I can scan it before to get a sense of how credible it is in terms of sample sizes etc.
I always hear scientific voices immediately disregard papers and sources because its like p or n=10 (10 people or something) and I dont want to waste time with vanity publications/articles
They’ve got an abstract that covers this in short as the first paragraph.
and I dont want to waste time with vanity publications/articles
This is an interesting sentiment. Almost all scientific publications undergo peer review, so this is the primary filter for keeping “crap” out.
I’m interested where you got the idea that people are doing or publishing scientific or research material for “vanity” purposes. Where did you hear about this or decide it was a thing?
And don’t get me wrong. There is PLENTY of crap out there. And do you know how to know it is crap? You read it. You read the entire god-damned thing and you understand and interpret, and read between the lines of what they did in their experimental design. The gaps they left in their methods or statistical analyses that weren’t obvious to the referees. You have a suspicion that its too good to be true and you spend time with that suspicion and their material, maybe even ask for their data, and you work out why you have this suspicion. You ideate, obsess over it. You think about it in the shower, on your bike, while grocery shopping. You harass strangers on the bus with the issue. You learn simulation theory and monte carlo to see how reproducible the result was. And eventually, you break through. Eureka! You’ve done one science.
There is no faster way (other than simply developing experience, knowledge and improving by doing the thing). You need to read the crap too so that you can understand why its crap. Seeking a faster way is to miss the concept entirely.
The process is the point. There is no where to go; there is only chop wood and carry water.
She’s talking about art here, but I think Sarah Andersens comic makes the point:
Thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you for that. I’ve tried to enter university once but the noise and pressure in teenage times plus mediocre education plus laziness from my side didn’t allow it, but the curiosity was still here but I never knew (or, at least, I thought I didn’t knew) how to do it. Don’t want to do it professionally, at least not now, don’t have time, but I would like to understand things more. In the end, what I had in my mind and thought was wrong is something like what u said, so I have no excuses and nothing else to do besides starts doing.
The OP and you didn’t know, but you’ve made the life of someone better just by giving hope that this someone know how to do.
Thanks ❤️
The first time I encounter an unfamiliar subject, I start by trying to identify the different current leading theories and their main points of contention. Then my impulse to evaluate the competing claims for myself motivates my further research, and keeps me critically engaged with the evidence. It’s like I’m building different conceptual models in parallel, and seeing how each new piece fits differently in each one.
I find that can often be better than lectures where the professor is advocating for their own specific theory, or introductory courses where textbooks stick to consensus opinions and avoid open questions. In those cases you’re just passively assembling the model you’re provided—but I find it’s ultimately more enlightening if you try to break things while you’re building them.
There are some pitfalls to be aware of that may not be very intuitive for someone who is not a scientist and even tricky if you are one:
- the place where something is published matters and it can be hard to tell what is good and what is bad. If you work in a certain field for a few years and talk with your peers, you will get an idea how to read certain types of articles, depending on where they are published. Each field has their top journals/conferences and lower quality ones. If you conduct an amazing new experiment, you will try to get it published in the better ones. This doesn’t mean that the other ones are complete crap, but there may be some problems with the research that you as an outsider won’t see. The problem is, they are all called something like “International Top Conference/Journal for A Field With A Cool Sounding Name”.
There were some embarrassing cases during the Covid pandemic where professors from different fields like economics tried to pose as virus experts because they also know statistics. So they tried to give critical comments about the virologists. But if you have never been in an actual lab where people work with viruses, you have no clue whether things like reasons for excluding certain cases from an analysis are legitimate. You also don’t know which key variables you need to know (e.g., is temperature important for vaccine effectiveness? I don’t know, but if it is, a virologist can tell you and an economist can’t).
A proxy measure for this quality of conference/journal is the number of people who have cited an article. But this doesn’t always help and can also be misleading, and some fields in the social sciences and humanities don’t care about this at all. And even if it counts, it strongly varies by field. For example, medicine has really high citation counts (thus many of the top journals across disciplines) and mathematics has really low citation counts.
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don’t rely on only a single study. If you look for the light therapy example, one study is better than no study, but usually it helps if you have the time to read a few more studies. Even if one study finds an effect, it is not uncommon that was just due to pure randomness or bad practices during data analysis (“p hacking”, “HARKing” etc. This is the best pathway, but very time intense. Even many scientists fail to read their literature properly to stay up to date (because you have tons of other stuff to do as well and the reality is that writing, not reading, keeps you in your job).
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if you don’t have a lot of time to read 10-20 articles, you might still be lucky and find a summary article about the topic. They are sometimes called “literature synthesis”, “literature review”, “systematic review”, or “meta analysis” (good search terms, btw). If you find one that was published in a good journal/conference (or has let’s say more than 100 citations if it was published at least 5 years ago - again, take this with a grain of salt), chances are high that’s the gold nugget you are looking for. Read this thing properly and you either have a good overview or at least found more interesting studies to read.
Btw: If you can’t download an article from for example google scholar, there are search engines where you can get almost anything for free (a good one is maintained by Alexandra Elbakyan). If that doesn’t help, write to the authors directly. If it’s a field of practical relevance, maybe you can even include the exact question you have and they may share their expertise and a few more sources with you.
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As far as using search engines to find research papers, try including things like “abstract” “conclusion” and “et al.” in your query.
