{"id":37,"date":"2007-10-14T10:50:21","date_gmt":"2007-10-13T21:50:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.waikato.ac.nz\/bioblog\/2007\/10\/things_to_think_about_when_rea\/"},"modified":"2007-10-14T10:50:21","modified_gmt":"2007-10-13T21:50:21","slug":"things-to-think-about-when-rea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.waikato.ac.nz\/bioblog\/2007\/10\/things-to-think-about-when-rea\/","title":{"rendered":"Things to think about when reading a scientific paper"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><font>Sometimes I base these blogs on a scientific paper that&#039;s caught my eye. I&#039;m hoping that sometimes you&#039;ll search out the original reference and read it for yourself. But when a paper is cited in support of an argument &#8211; how can you decide whether the contents stack up?<\/font><\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p><font>Simple is good. A paper that&#039;s reporting on a test of a single hypothesis is less likely to throw up random data, the more so if the hypothesis has been carefully framed and selected to start with.<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font>Was there a large sample size? As you already know, with a small sample, an unusual or aberrant data point may skew your results.<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font>There&#039;s nothing wrong with&nbsp;a negative result (in statistical terms, one which has to accept the null hypothesis). What often happens is that only the positive results get published, &amp; this does tend to skew our view of science. There are times (a lot of them, actually) when the experimental data aren&#039;t what the hypothesis predicted. That&#039;s scientific reality.<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font>How significant are the data? If there&#039;s only a small effect from the treatment, beware of special pleading that inflates its importance.<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font>Are there multiple sources of supporting evidence? In other words, are there a range of papers, in a variety of journals, that confirm the results presented here? OK, that&#039;s not always going to be possible &#8211; in a field where our knowledge is rapidly expanding, someone is always going to stick their neck out with something novel. But even then, they&#039;ll have been building on previous work by other scientists. And these cutting-edge studies are always subjected to intense scrutiny, as other researchers try to replicate their results &#8211; if there&#039;s good science there, it will eventually be confirmed. And if it has no real substance, it will eventually be rejected (so-called &quot;cold fusion&quot; is a good example!). In other words, good science is eventually self-correcting.<\/font><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sometimes I base these blogs on a scientific paper that&#039;s caught my eye. I&#039;m hoping that sometimes you&#039;ll search out the original reference and read it for yourself. But when a paper is cited in support of an argument &#8211; how can you decide whether the contents stack up?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,15],"tags":[3,10],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v22.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Things to think about when reading a scientific paper : BioBlog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blog.waikato.ac.nz\/bioblog\/2007\/10\/things-to-think-about-when-rea\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Things to think about when reading a scientific paper : BioBlog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Sometimes I base these blogs on a scientific paper that&#039;s caught my eye. 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