All you never asked about scientific papers
But might be curious to learn anyways
Autumn is in full swing here in southern Germany (meaning cold, wet and a bit windy). It feels strange that I was experiencing my very first start of polar night in Svalbard precisely a year ago. One thing it taught me is that a good mind-body routine is essential when going into winter. So, I was super happy that my all-time favourite pilates coach, Maddy Karlsson, is hosting a 30-day mindfulness challenge for November, which consists of daily movement and mindfulness practices. And I am all in for making the 30 days.
I have been working on an early draft for my first scientific article this week. I am mainly converting my master's thesis into a scientific paper, so the work mainly consists of re-arranging, condensing, prioritising and rephrasing. Well, for someone who strongly dislikes reading anything she has written TWICE, this requires a bit of motivation. But it's going okay so far. One thing I have noticed when telling people that I am currently working on a publication is that it comes with an awkward atmosphere when they don't know what it is about but are also hesitant to ask. I get it. Even though I have been doing a Bachelor's before, only my master's studies introduced me to the real world of scientific papers and publications. So why does it seem unspoken that people who didn't come in touch with academic writing during their formal education remain excluded from what must seem to them some magic or maybe even an elite club of people who know what a scientific paper and its purpose are? I believe that papers are a great way to dive deeper into ANY research topic (from politics to astrophysics, computer sciences, medical care, psychology, you name it) without any academic background!
So, let's start with the basics.
What is a paper?
A scientific paper (aka scientific article) is an article published in a magazine within that specific research field. You can imagine it like a recipe published in a cooking magazine.
And there might be magazines on soups and stews, baking, vegan cuisine, etc. So, for example, for my field of research, I frequently come across articles from magazines called "Marine Policy", "Marine Pollution Bulletin", "Marine Mammal Science", "Polar Research", etc. Nowadays, most scientific articles are no longer printed in a magazine but are published online (sometimes behind paywalls, but that's a different story).
Why scientists publish papers?
Okay, it's an article. But why? Basically, scientific articles are one element of how science works and develops further – in any research discipline. In a paper, one or multiple authors, venture on a particular perspective on an issue or explain an experiment, survey or fieldwork they undertook and the results they found. Let's go back to the cooking and baking example. Two people discovered that mixing flour and water and exposing it to heat makes something edible. They were excited about their discovery, named it "bread", and published an article about it in a general magazine for food and beverages. Some others reading the article got curious and took different roads. Some started to enhance it by testing different proportions of water and flour. Some started using different types of flour. Others experimented with different temperatures and resting and baking times. Some started adding salt and sugar. A few wanted to prove that it was not edible (hypothesis "not edible") and started experimenting by feeding it to people in a survey group. Their expectations were negative symptoms or death. They eventually had to conclude that their hypothesis was wrong and that the bread thing was indeed edible. In between, some authors were writing articles that consolidated and identified patterns in the research of others. Something like "x studies rested the dough overnight, which led to more fluffiness and flavour, which suggests it is a recommended practice." Something like this is called a "literature review" – something that does research based on previous literature by trying to investigate in which direction the whole research field is moving.
And actually, this is how research works. Scientists link their research either by showing the novelty of their research, contributing to new knowledge, consolidating, confirming or rejecting previous results or closing knowledge gaps. There are more formal processes around it to ensure good practice in research and authorship. A "good" scientific paper is usually peer-reviewed. This means the article goes through independent reviewer steps that critically assess the paper and can demand revisions before publication. Each official paper has a unique DOI (digital object identifier).
It functions similarly to the ISBN for books, a unique identifier for the article. So, especially in today's world of never knowing what is true to believe, being able to go deeper into a scientific source is a valuable skill to have 😊
How to find and read a paper?
I hope that makes it a bit more clear. Now, if you are working on scientific papers for work or school, I do not have to tell you how to read your papers. However, what if you do not? How do you even get in touch with scientific papers? Papers are usually accompanied by media and news articles that take some aspects out of a study and publish them. It is usually with good intentions, but sometimes, facts get taken out of context. Or the article simply cannot cover it all, but YOU have questions and want to know more. Most good newspapers cite their sources. You may find them underneath an article like this:
Often, with online content, there will be a direct hyperlink within the text that takes you to the paper:
Okay, now you did it. You found your paper. And it looks LONG and daunting.
Don't worry. Remember, you had some specific questions in your head or at least a slight nudge of curiosity that wants you to get more details – but necessary, not all this scientific bulk dropped on you. Now, it all comes down to how you read the paper. And you probably NEVER read the entire thing from A to Z. Reading and UNDERSTANDING such a paper to its fullest can take multiple hours. So even scientists seldom read to this extent. The first thing to know is that most papers follow the same structure. There might be a few differences depending on the scientific disciplines, but nearly all start with an Abstract. A section that is usually 150 – 300 words and is supposed to summarise the whole article. This is where you can get started to get an overall feeling for the paper. Then, there are usually sections labelled:
Introduction: Authors provide background on previous research in the field and what they tried to answer within the research they are presenting. If we remember the bread thing, it might summarise previous steps in the bread discovery journey that led the authors to investigate how adding salt to the mix would work out - probably since salt made other things taste more flavourful, too ;)
Methods: Authors explain tools and approaches to addressing their research questions and aims. “We baked 15 loaves of bread with and 15 without salt and had 100 people tasting it.”
Results: Authors explain their findings without interpreting them yet. “89 of 100 people liked the bread with salt more.”
Discussion: Authors discuss the meaning and relevance of their findings, shortcomings, future research, etc. “Baking bread with salt tastes better and one should consider always adding salt. However, the bread testers were all male and in the age group above 60 years old, so maybe these findings do not apply to all people. One should do the study again with a more diverse test group. One could also repeat the study with other spices like pepper.”
Conclusion: The authors highlight the main findings and relevance. “This study indicates that by adding salt, bread becomes a more flavourful taste.”
References: List of other literature used in the paper - so you can dig even deeper if you like to ;)
Knowing this structure, you can jump to a particular section directly to read about what is actually of interest to you:
How did they discover what they found? Methods.
Are there limitations or shortcomings of the study that are important to know? Discussion.
Don’t really understand the impact or outcome of the study. Most likely Conclusion or last paragraph of the discussion.
More details about the study? Start with the conclusion, and only if you want to go deeper, go to results or discussion.
Interested in some background information and previous that made the scientists do the study? Introduction.
How I do it
Let's look at an example and how I approach it if I come across a paper that interests me, but I do not necessarily want to and need to go into the details. I just want a tiny bit more information to satisfy my curiosity. During a webinar on How marine mammals respond to underwater noise by DOSITS, I saw a visualisation with a footnote that linked to a paper called "Singing humpback whales respond to wind noise, but not to vessel noise" by Girola et al. (2023)1.
I was confused. What did the authors mean by this? That whales would ignore vessels but be disturbed by wind? Certainly not. But I could not understand it – so I googled the article and found it. Next, I spent less than five minutes only reading the abstract, the very last paragraph, and skimmed through the further parts of the discussion. Here is what I learned:
Humpback whales increase the intensity (loudness) of their songs when surface wind increases (wind on the surface increases general background sound underwater)
The authors wanted to investigate the correlation between natural wind noise, vessel noise and the singing behaviour of humpback whales
The study finds that humpback whales
increase the loudness of their singing when the wind increases (confirm previous studies)
do not increase the loudness of their singing when vessel noise is present
increase the loudness of their singing when the wind increases, and vessel noise is present
This finding is essential for behavioural research on how (humpback) whales respond to vessel noise: Future research should pay attention to the fact that an increase in signing intensity is most likely NOT a good indicator to assess the impacts of shipping noise, but there might be other responses to look into (such as switching to a different frequency or non-audible behavioural or stress responses)
Don't worry if this sounds still a bit “wingardium leviosa” to you.
This was just an example of what I am interested in (and hence also am familiar with some more of the lingo in this field). You might like to read about something completely different in a different paper. You have all it takes to get curious about looking into an actual scientific article! All you need is actually your curiosity or critical thinking about a certain topic. I would love to know if this made you more likely to look further into a study mentioned somewhere and nudges you to be more curious!
Girola, E., Dunlop, R. A., & Noad, M. J. (2023). Singing humpback whales respond to wind noise, but not to vessel noise. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 290(1998) DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2023.0204