If there is one universal shared experience that I can, with some confidence, claim all researchers share then it is the love of free food. Be it biscuits, fruit, small strangely shaped corn things or Read more…
Research is in many ways a subject of debate. Ideas are presented with evidence and through repetition and discussion they are tested and examined. Every discovery or methodology in science is subject to inquiry, dissection Read more…
Working as a researcher is a job that requires a lot of adaptability. This is understandable given that the core of the scientific method could be loosely described as “I recon this might happen but Read more…
1 Comment
Joaquin Barroso · 13 November 2015 at 18:16
LOL good one!
The whole idea around the seriousness -and sometimes perhaps even sanctity- of a research article makes great fodder for comedy in an ever more cynical world. I enjoyed this post of yours as well as those about how to write a paper, but what is your take on how to -seriously- read a research paper? This is a topic I’m very much interested in since I believe papers aren’t novels that are supposed to always be read from top to bottom. What is your technique? Mine, for a topic I’m familiar with and/or on which I’m working, is: abstract -> results -> conclusions. If I want to reproduce or adapt a technique or method I will take it all the way to the methods section, while the introduction I only read it diagonally since I’m already sold on the premise. The amount of information available nowadays makes it really hard to go deep into every paper while staying on top of all the relevant literature. So throughout blogs I’m conducting a sort of informal survey on the research-paper-reading habits of other researchers interested in scientific literacy.
Read you next Wednesday!