This website is a work-in-progress. I have no idea what I'm doing, but I'm doing it. Take that, perfectionism.
Check out this 3 min video about my research!
And if you are curious, check out some details about my work in this preprint:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.22.449416v1
The preprint is now a post(?)print in Cell Reports!
Titles and abstracts are often very uninformative, so I don't spend much time there. In fact, I don't understand most titles and abstracts and just frown in confusion. So go ahead and skip the text. Summon your inner child and take a look at the figures first. If the figures look alien, this paper is probably out of your comfort zone (or badly written...) and it will take longer to process. Breathe. You might need to read all the words after all... But try to stick with the figures for a bit. Skip the legend at first, look at the axes. Can you understand the key finding this figure was meant to illustrate? Now look at the legend - do you agree with what the authors wrote? I do this for every figure. I try to imagine that I myself collected that data. What story would I be able to tell with it? This gives me a slightly less biased view of the results - I get to process the actual data before giving the authors a chance to say things like "Figure 1 shows that" and "this conclusion is supported by Figure 2".
Depending on how much time I have and how informative the figures were, I either go back to the intro or straight to the discussion. Both sections will place the paper in the big picture context, but discussions are more speculative. If the figures made no sense to me, and I can't follow the author's rationale, the discussion will most likely not help. In that case, I will try to read all the words, from start to finish.
But even if the figures made sense, maybe I missed something - historical context, nuances in the data, or experimental design tricks. If I have enough time, I like to give the authors a chance to justify their work and elaborate on it. I read intro, results and discussion. And when the authors mention supplementary figures, I take a look at them.
Now I have the methods left. If the paper is in my niche area, I most likely understand the methods very well. So well that I am very much aware of caveats and sources of variability and I care very deeply about certain details - the internal solutions, inclusion and exclusion criteria, virus titer, age and sex of animals, etc etc. In fact, as I was looking at the figures, I was already questioning these things, and I read the method sections I cared about. On the other hand, if the methods are very far from my comfort zone, there is very little to gain from reading the method section critically. Don't get me wrong, I'll still read it if I have the time, but it's low on my priority list.
Aaaand... that's it! Figures first (with an optional pinch of Methods). Then Discussion (or Intro). Then Intro, Results and Discussion. And finally, more Methods.
After all this, hopefully the abstract and title will make sense. And maybe you'll nod in agreement or tilt your head with skepticism. And on to the next paper we go.