Primary Literature

(This is the cover of the current issue of Science magazine)

When you are in grade school you might get away with writing a research paper entirely from information you found in an encyclopedia. As you move on to high school and some college classes, you have to use magazine articles and books for you research paper. However, if you go into the sciences, there will come a day when the professor says to you, "I want you to use the Primary Literature for this paper".

When I put together a post for this blog, I try to find at least one article from a scientific journal somewhere on the web that I can link to about that subject. These are hard to read. They have names like, Type I IL-4Rs Selectively Activate IRS-2 to Induce Target Gene Expression in Macrophages, where you typically can only fully understand a few of the words in the title.

The problem, for lots of people, is that scientist speak a foreign language. Still, it's worthwhile to decipher these things if you want to be on the cutting edge of science. Primary means first and reading a scientific article is getting the information first hand from the person or people who did the study. If you really understand it and have all the equipment and time, you ought to be able to go out and repeat the experiment after reading about it. Then you would know for sure if it all worked the way the author said it did.

There is a shortcut. You can just read the abstract which is always at the top and is a sort of synopsis of the paper. The abstract should tell you in a general kind of way what the experiment was about and what it indicated. If that's as far as you get, you're still way ahead of the general population that gets its science news from television and newspapers.

It's important to keep in mind that just because a study was published, doesn't mean it was a good study. On future Sundays I plan to go into what makes up "Good" science, but for now it's safest to remember that a single paper may or may not mean anything but if ten papers (from ten different studies) came to the same conclusion, it's probably significant.


Links

When Peer Review Produces Unsound Science

This man thinks scientist should learn to talk to regular people.

This is a very long and interesting page about science and the internet.

Word of the Day

Empirical: Observable. Scientists don't study things that you can't measure in some way. For instance, you won't find a scientific study about what the prettiest color is but you might find one that told you what color most people preferred. You can measure people's preferences. You can't measure something like how pretty a color is.