Ask Lemmy

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:

1. 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.

2. 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).

3. 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.

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.

As far as using search engines to find research papers, try including things like "abstract" "conclusion" and "et al." in your query.

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.

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.

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, ...

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?