Learning How to Read a Journal Paper
The title of this post is a little presumptive since I haven't even entered grad school yet, but I've been trying to figure out how to effectively read a journal paper because I believe that's going to be a critical skill in my grad student toolbox. I've been reading a lot of papers to try to get up to speed on my future adviser's work and I've been trying to consciously improve my reading process as I go. So far, here are some of the strategies I've used:
Look up new words/abbreviations as soon as I encounter them. When I began reading papers on a particular topic, this was a real pain because I was having to look up multiple words in each sentence. It took me over a week to work my way through the first paper I read because I could only digest a few paragraphs at a time. But the effort really paid off - if I had skipped past the words I didn't know, most of the meaning of the paper would have been lost on me (let's be honest, probably most of the paper's significance is still lost on me but at least now I know it was talking about oligonucleotides which are short chains of the nucleic acids that make up DNA). And now, as I dive in deeper into this particular topic, I am seeing the same words over again and I either remember them right off the bat or do a quick Google search to remind myself what they are, which barely interrupts my reading rhythm.
Take the time to read a Wikipedia article or two for context. The journal papers that I'm reading are not just introducing me to new hypotheses and conclusions, they're also introducing me to an entire discipline. Journal papers always describe the analytical methods they use, the materials that were tested, and the tools that were used to image the results. I try to look up these methods and materials and read about them as well to get a better understanding of the state of the technology supporting the research. I've never been in an analytical biology lab, and I had no idea what transmission electron microscopy (TEM) was, for instance. But after reading a Wikipedia article about TEM, I was introduced to a common imaging tool used in biology and chemistry. I've come across TEM in multiple papers now, and I am learning where it is useful and what it is capable of imaging.
Always read the supplementary materials. Some journal papers provide supplementary materials, and when they do, I read them. Sometimes they are incredibly dense mathematical proofs or just lists of DNA chains, but I go through them anyway. The supplementary materials are good exposure to the nitty gritty details of the research, and always provide more words that I should be looking up on Wikipedia.
As soon as a figure is mentioned in the paper text, go over to the figure, read the caption carefully and study the images. This may work just for visual learners like myself, but I cannot process what the paper text is saying about a figure until I have taken a close look at the figure itself. My lazy inclination is to read the paper text and not take more than a cursory glance at the figure, but that often ruins my comprehension of the paper. I find that when I take the time to link the caption text to each part of the figure, and try to gain an intuitive understanding of what the figure is conveying, I subsequently have a much easier time understanding the paper text that is referring to the figure.
There are a lot of things that I'm still not sure how to handle properly with a research paper. If there's a lot of math, should I be trying to recreate the steps myself to understand the meaning of the variables and the linear algebra? If there's code, should I try re-writing it myself? How closely should I look at data tables? Should I be re-reading papers several times for greater comprehension? How do I make sure I can not only understand a paper, but communicate it to others? I have more to learn!