How to Read and Understand Science
Articles, articles everywhere
The pandemic caused a lot of misinformation. I lost count of the number of times I’ve rolled my eyes to someone saying “do your own research.”
The problem with this is that doing research is a skill. It’s something that you develop with practice. You get better at it by constantly reading, analyzing, and publishing research. Not by googling or watching youtube videos.
It also didn’t help to have people on television commenting on topics outside their field of expertise. For example, a lot of people used this article to say that pandemic mandates were baseless.
This article talks about a series of countries, analyzes mandates and their impact on the number of infected people. The conclusion is that the mandates didn’t influence the number of people infected. The issue is that the article compares countries that are completely different, in social and cultural norms. It compares Italy with South Korea, for example.
How can anyone say that the behavior of Italians in the face of these mandates is the same as that of South Koreans? So no, we cannot conclude from this study that mandates do not work.
But where to do research and find reliable information?
Articles, articles, articles.
Because not everyone has the time/patience/ability to read articles, following people who share scientific content is also a good idea.
For instance, I love the youtube channel of Mama Doctor Jones, a gynecologist who talks about controversial topics. But there are a lot of people sharing amazing content that is actually research-based.
How to read articles:
Articles have one or more questions that they seek to answer. They have an introduction, methods, results, discussion, and conclusion.
There are also systematic reviews. They do not present new information but rather summarize all the information known about that topic. They create debate and identify questions that need to be answered in future studies. Always pay attention to publication dates when seeking reviews. For example, a review article on coronaviruses published in 2018 would be pretty useless today.
Then you have meta-analysis. This is when we use statistical methods to summarize the results of several studies on a topic.
There are many different ways of reading scientific articles, but this is what I look to do:
Before reading the article:
1) It is peer-reviewed? This means that the article has been reviewed by people in the field.
2) Is it published in a leading journal? You can see a list of reputable journals here.
Reading the article:
1) Don’t pay too much attention to the abstract. It’s usually the only thing people read when they want to find something quickly. It’s a summary of the study and many times people want to “sell their fish” and overestimate the results they got here.
2) Read or at least skim through the introduction. It is the researchers’ starting point for the study.
3) Read the goals. They are usually the last paragraph of the introduction. They explain why the article exists, and what is the problem that researchers are attempting to solve.
4) Read the methods. Pay attention to sample size (always!).
5) Read the results, or at least look at the tables and graphs.
6) Discussion. Read the authors’ interpretation of the results. Read the limitations of the study. This is what could have been improved and what may have influenced the results. For example. in the study I mentioned earlier, the comparison of very different countries is a limitation.
7) See the studies mentioned in the references (if you are doing a more in-depth analysis) and other articles that make reference to that study. See who the authors are.
There are many ways to read articles, some much more time-consuming than this one. Others are quicker. It depends a lot on your goal and interest in that particular topic. If, in the end, you can manage to explain what you read to someone else, I would say that you are on a good path.
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