My personal philosophy is that learning to read papers occurs in stages. Stage 1: late undergrad/early grad school. The goal is simply to understand what claims the paper is making and how they did what they did. Stage 2: grad school. Learn to be hypercritical 1/
Thank you
@hcmacomber
&
@ArielleLBaker
for these great tweets. The 2 sides of the coin that for evaluating and navigating scientific literature:
**** Learn to be critical but don't forget to learn!! ****
Balancing those 2 is the key and grad school is where to learn to do it!
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so you can detect every possible flaw in a paper. Stage 3: late grad school/early postdoc. Realize that all papers have flaws, and learn to determine which flaws are actually important and which are not. Stage 4: late postdoc/early PI. Learning to think not just about 2/
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whether the paper answers the question it's asking, but also whether that question is even the right question in the first place. Then figure out what the right questions are, which is the hardest part of science.
This is a gross approximation, but I think it has 3/
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some truth to it.
Maybe one of my more senior colleagues can comment on what stage 5 is - I haven't figure it out yet. 4/4
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@lukesjulson
@EA_Proctor
Great post. Somewhere in there (not sure if it’s a separate stage or part of another) is learning to see the flaws in your own work that parallel flaws you see in published papers, and to figure out which are important to fix now and which can be addressed in future work.
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