Reading

You will gain facility and effectiveness in reading journal articles as you accumulate experience. Here, we focus on some strategies and tools that will help.

• LOTS of good tips here with strategies for reading scientific papers.

• A good reference manager can save your life. Two free ones are Mendeley and Zotero. There are others. Pick one and use it. Check out this overview.

• Keeping up with the literature can feel like drinking from a fire hose, but there are strategies and tools to help.

• While we're talking tools, several relatively new services have created entirely new and often very helpful portals to pertinent literature. Check these out to see this brave new world:

  • Connected Papers

  • Scite

  • Litmaps

• The two most commonly used search services for accessing scientific literature are Google Scholar (how-to, and pluses and minuses), and Web of Science (access via your University library web site, how-to). Both are useful and here is how they differ. Note that often it is just as helpful to use these services to find papers that have cited a given paper as it is to use them to get literature "hits" in the first place.

• Not all papers are created equal. One first step in evaluating research is to assess the quality of the journal where it is published. All reputable journals practice peer-review, which is critical to the objective assessment of scientific papers. Other important factors to consider when reading scientific papers are: the age of the journal (i.e. has it stood the test of time?), impact factor, general reputation (e.g. is it an arm of a large established scientific society), acceptance rate, editorial policies, and whether its contents are available via common search services. Nevertheless, there is a wide range of quality and impact of papers in any given journal, and there have been calls to minimize the use of impact factors in evaluating scientific contributions, for example by broadening the metrics beyond citations. Ultimately, it is you who are the judge of how confident you are in the conclusions of any one publication.