In our undergraduate years, as we get involved with research and science, it can be incredibly overwhelming to read scientific literature. It’s easy to drown in hundreds of thousands of articles with fancy-sounding titles, pages and pages of complex writings, and dozens of figures that you have no idea what they mean. However, reading scientific literature is a necessary skill to have, and you must be able to understand what scientists know, and what they don’t.
Therefore, I’ve created a list of tips and advice to tackle scientific literature as an undergraduate. Follow my advice, and you’re on your way to impress your supervisors with your knowledge, and create a nuanced understanding of where your research lies within the body of knowledge that scientists have been cultivating!
Step 1: Know how to filter for papers of interest.
To kick things off, you’ll need to know how to filter for papers you need. To find papers relevant to your own research, you’ll need to apply specific filters. Take, for example, breast cancer research I was working on this summer – if I simply type into Google Scholar, “breast cancer,” 3.9 million results pop up. Even the most prolific and dedicated researcher could not meaningfully process the information in so many articles. Additionally, the vast majority of these papers are not actually relevant to the specific project I was working on. The key is to narrow the papers down to a specific niche, rather than an entire field of research.
Now, let’s try to narrow down this research. For example, I was looking at the role of a specific protein called “C-X-C-R-4” in breast cancer. Typing that into google scholar yields 370,000 results. While this was useful at the very beginning and I was trying to understand the rule of this specific protein, this search was still much too broad for my specific research. To narrow down even further, I typed, ‘“CXCR4” AND “tumor-associated macrophages.” Pro tip: when you type in quoted words with an ‘and’ in between, the search bar will find papers with both of those keywords. Now, this search reveals 4,500 papers. Still far too much for me to go through in a short timespan, but now I’ve narrowed down papers that are specifically relevant to a niche that I’m trying to carve for myself. Adding in another protein of interest yields me less than 200 papers, each of which are quite relevant to my own research. Now, I can begin to understand what scientists know, and more importantly, what they don’t – this provides me, the researcher, an opportunity to dig into some exciting work.
So you’ve found papers of interest that are specifically relevant to your own project, and now you have to actually understand the information there. If you feel like you’re being assaulted with unnecessarily complex terms, acronyms, and visuals, never fear! I have some proven strategies that can help process the information to make it manageable and useful.
Step 2: The Abstract
To start, always read the abstract. This gives you a simplified version of the context behind the research, the author’s reasoning, the actual work they did, their results, and what they mean. This will also help you decide whether or not this paper is actually worth reading in its entirety. More often than not, even with the golden keywords that you searched for, when you read the abstract of papers, you’ll realize that they’re not quite relevant in the way you’re hoping for your own work. This way, you’ll be able to save your own time and move on to the next paper, rather than reading the entire paper and not realizing their irrelevance until you get to the discussion.
Step 3: Introduction
If you’ve determined that this article has promise, move on to the introduction. Here, you’ll understand more deeply why scientists are interested in this specific section. You’ll want to read this section carefully, especially in topics that are difficult to understand – here is where the authors will describe their foundations for their research, or their “step 1,” as clearly as they ever will. If you want to understand the process that these scientists are following, this section is critical.
Step 4: Methods
The methods section, designed for replication, can often be skipped unless you plan to adopt specific techniques from the paper. You might be picking and choosing which of their gleaned information you want to use as you’re forging your own project path. As you’re trying to get acquainted with the field and design your own project, getting into the weeds of specifics for how scientists ran their experiments usually won’t be necessary, as long as you can understand and interpret their results. However, this information will be useful if you intend to use a certain technique or method in a similar approach that they do.
Step 5: Results
The results section, arguably the most useful, is where you’ll be able to find out the actual new information that these scientists are publishing. Typically, looking at the graphs in this section will be the fastest way to understand the data that these scientists generated. If there are certain types of graphs or pictures that you don’t understand, take a look carefully and read the description of those specific figures. If you have to, do some Googling to figure out how to read these graphs. As you get experienced in reading papers, this step will become faster and more intuitive. While the options seem endless, there is a limited amount of types of graphs and figures that scientists make!
Step 6: Discussion
The discussion is where the investigators discuss the implications of their research. This section is useful if you feel that you still haven’t gotten the full grasp of their research, but it won’t necessarily give you a lot of new information.
Step 7: Taking notes
Even if you fully understand what each paper is discussing, most likely you’ll be looking at dozens of different articles for your researchers. Even the most veteran researcher couldn’t hope to retain everything after absorbing so much information. Therefore, I use specific techniques to make sure I understand what I need from each paper.
After each paper I read, I try to write down any relevant information that they’ve determined in a notebook in bullet forms. For instance: “this tumor is an issue because [x]. Targeting this protein poses a promising therapy because [y].” Remember, these notes are for you and for you only! If it helps you to include fun tidbits or metaphors to help you understand, that’s your prerogative. I myself likened tumor-associated macrophages to cells mind-controlled by cancer. Arrows and drawings are also your friends. Even something as simple as “Immunosuppressive protein ↑ = Immune system ↓ = Cancer growth = bad. Protein inhibitor → immunosuppressive protein ↓ = Immune system ↑ = Cancer remission = good!” Can be enormously helpful. No matter how complex research seems, a shocking amount of it will always be “when this goes down, that goes up. When we do this, these go up, and this is good or bad because…” Then things will make more sense as you add in the scientific lingo when you write about your own research!
Step 8: Read. A lot.
With all of these tips, you can finally understand and process academic research! Even following these steps, you won’t necessarily find the perfect articles for your own work. You’ll have to read many articles to find the information you need. Don’t get discouraged! This is part of the research process. I’d also recommend using Princeton library’s vast resources to find more articles and papers that you could use.
Let the current research guide your own. For instance, if one paper says that a certain piece of information is lacking, try and find it in other papers — and if can’t, that’s an opportunity for you to fill in some gap of missing knowledge in the scientific corpus. Remember, scientists are collaborators: we work together to find the knowledge we need.
And there you have it – you can turn reading research literature into a manageable task if you follow these steps. Good luck to aspiring scientists and investigators!
— Gabriel Ascoli, Humanities Correspondent
