What do you make of scientific papers?
First year students may yet to have read one in depth but second and third years should be getting to grips with what is the primary mode of communication of scientific research.
They can seem daunting, especially at first. For a start there are thousands of journals out there and it can be difficult to get a measure of the differences between them. Which is better — Nature or Science? The EMBO Journal or the Journal of Biological Chemistry? How do you find out?
As an undergraduate student, you may feel that you are in no position to criticise the contents of a paper that has obviously been written by an ‘expert’. But you should never be afraid to ask questions.
This week I gave the 2nd year Biochemists on my Macromolecular Structure and Function course a short lecture on how and why the scientific literature has the form it does (and what changes might be around the corner). You can have a look at the slides from my talk (PDF – quality reduced a tad to keep the file size small).
If the slides pique an interest please let me know — either by email or by leaving a comment below. The information in the slides is only sketchy so I would be more than happy to arrange a repeat the lecture if there is sufficient interest (this time making sure there is enough time for Q&A at the end).
Update (13 Feb 2013): I did a re-run of this lecture on 12th Feb 2013 for the whole department. For this latter occasion I expanded my comments. You can access the slides via SlideShare. Please feel free to ask questions in the comments below or by email.
Thanks for your nice posting about the reading procedure of scientific literature.