How To Read Research Papers Effectively | Prof. David Stuckler

did anyone ever teach you how to read a scientific article chances are you never got any training in how to read but you're grad students reading is the most important thing you can do we work in a knowledge economy you've got to learn imbibe information digest it and spit it back make good sense of it for your research i'm professor david stuckler and this is what i wish i would have had as a graduate student it would have saved me so much time so many things i see from my students who i've taught at harvard oxford cambridge and now bocconi and milan where i'm a full professor these are things that they're just expected to figure out these core skills reading writing presenting that they don't get any training on because our universities just aren't set up that way but no more today i'm going to teach you the triple pass method for how to reach a scientific article a method that when you apply it and you're going to feel good applying it by the end of this video it's going to make it so easy to read so fast that you're going to be able to read digest and understand five scientific articles in the time that i took you to just read one this is gonna be a lifesaver and you're gonna wonder why just like i do why do universities not teach this stuff let's roll up our sleeves and dive straight in first whenever you pick up a scientific paper you need to know your why define your why why are you reading this paper what do you want to get out of this paper why is it on your desk or computer wherever it is are you doing to just get a sense of what the current state of knowledge is are you trying to get information to back up a specific point you're making as you're writing are you doing a systematic literature review and you're actually having to extract key information from it or are you trying to do a critique perhaps find more references there are many different reasons to read a scientific paper but you need to know for yourself why are you reading these papers because that is going to shape the type of reading you do and yes that's right there's not just one way of reading but there are multiple ways of reading in fact there are three and we're going to talk about them in the triple pass method so the way i start with the triple pass method is a little bit like google maps which one of my favorite functionalities of google maps is the bird's eye view where you take a helicopter view of your city it's a perspective maybe you've never seen before unless you've flown around in a helicopter and and it's it's a cool way to get a different angle and that's really the first pass of the triple pass looking at a paper taking a bird's-eye view of it not fully reading it but just checking out the title taking a glance at the abstract scanning through it to see is this something that i want to go further with is this something that i actually need to read to fulfill my purpose when novices read and also gather information they often emphasize verbatim details verbatim information like math equations formulas dates facts and figures whereas experts tend to read to gather the gist it's kind of the crux of the idea the core concept the key information it's a little bit fuzzier it's not as crisp and precise as verbatim information but it's a lot more durable and easier to remember experts read for the gist and that's what you need to do and just in this first pass what i call the bird's eye view you need to get the gist and you need to know is this article relevant for my why and what's it about does this fit in my space is this something i want to go further with okay fantastic so you do decide to go further now you get to the second stage of the triple pass and we've been hanging around at the helicopter view and i think of the second pass a bit like swooping what hawks do when they're hanging out in the sky and they see a mouse wanna swoop in in in a very forensic way and just pull out that mouse and that is the swoop method it's the second part of the triple pass and this is what you're going to do in the vast majority of papers you're going to look at and read you might want to swoop to figure out what's the debate what are the main research questions what methods did they use what did they find where they're making conclusions you should be able to if you're swooping get some of these core details that you need for your purpose this swoop method only takes three to five minutes now hang on you're saying wait hey professor stuck wait this isn't you're actually not teaching us reading you what is this you're reading you go from the introduction to the methods the results conclusion you read it little nearly now that is a mistake i don't want you to do that because that's a recipe for time lost being frustrated getting confused about details you don't need to know about i can't even remember i look i published over 30 papers last year peer-reviewed journals and i can't remember the last time that i read a paper from start to finish because it's just not necessary you guys don't have infinite time and you don't have time to waste you need to be efficient understand why and i'll bet that this swoop method is going to answer 97 of the whys that you need for reading a particular article there are some cases as i said where you do need to get dirty with the paper roll up your sleeves and at this point you're probably going to need to print out the paper and maybe get a physical copy make it your own if you like highlighting marking stuff up this is the time to do that although i personally don't like a lot of rainbows of yellow blue paint highlights on my paper this is like the street level view we're now at kind of time square in new york and we can take a look around this is where we're getting eye to eye with the paper this is where we're going deep and the last time i did this was when i was doing a peer review when i needed to go into the paper and reconstruct what the authors did to get a very deep knowledge of their methods and their findings in order to critique it this can also be done if you need to extract some detailed information that's hidden that maybe you couldn't get just using the swoop method alone i know even when i critique papers for peer review i don't even necessarily i still don't read it cover to cover i still start from the paper from the inside out i might read the methods the results try and reconstruct what did the others do what did they find before going into more detail maybe reading the conclusions and introduction to give them more rich and detailed feedback but again i see so many students going to the third pass here of the triple pass method when sometimes they didn't even need to do it at all because the paper wasn't even relevant in one to two minutes they could have kicked it out or they could have gotten it just like that hawk swooping down to getting the detail now sometimes even doing this as students get a lot of frustration because and pull their how because paper's complex it's hard to follow i'm losing so much time going in circles on this paper can't make sense out of it and you need to know sometimes it's just terrible academic authors are often not given much writing training sometimes english is a second language papers are not often edited by journals themselves very effectively and sometimes the writing is just awful it's hard to follow go easy on yourselves give yourself a little bit of credit and don't feel dumb and slip into imposter syndrome sometimes the writing just is awful on the flip side i want you to take notice when the writing is good because that's a very very important clue for you that that this is a paper i want to emulate and as you read a lot you're going to start to notice commonalities and papers that are really easy to follow even when they're on very complex subjects and that has to do with writing effectively and being good at reading is being good at writing in disguise if you do still find that you're struggling a few practical things that you can do you can start a journal cub with other grad students and share papers digest them and collectively create a community of practice to support each other you can ask your mentors they can also help you if it's a very critical paper critical method that you need to replicate in your own studies practice of course makes perfect no different from reading reading is a skill to be able to extract and get that just very quickly in that swoop method takes time when when you've done this a few times you will find it might be a shift from reading especially if you've gone introduction to conclusion before but you will find you save so much time and you get really good at having laser-like focus like that hawk just swooping out the details you need finally if the paper is just too difficult or too complex you might not have the right training or sometimes you just need to break bracket it move on to the next paper and don't cause yourself that needless suffering come back to it the next day or at a later point um finally guys i i want to close with a rubber duck and the this rubber dock is something my professor at yale gave me when i was reading and it turned out that the writing of the paper was just terrible and my professor explained look here's another paper on the same subject so much clearer and easier to follow just too many authors out there muddy the waters to make them appear deep a phenomenon he called in sociology called obscurantism and he just decried didn't like the way the authors made things so much more complex than they need to be so give me this rubber duck and he said look i want you to remember this moment because this rubber duck is what computer scientists do when they have to debug code they actually talk aloud and they speak and explain it to the rubber duck and if they have that level of clarity they can often find where the bug is in their code and he said i want you to use this rubber duck and as a model for yourself when you write so that you don't put inflict on others what those papers inflicted on you and make it so easy and simple that even your grandmother could understand strip out the jargon and make it accessible that's going to increase your audience and increase your impact and i took a valuable lesson from that that has helped my writing to this day and has helped me get through even some more difficult papers uh to to take it easy on myself and avoid i've been able to avoid 90 of some torturous papers that i didn't need to go through detailed methods that weren't even directly relevant to my method or field by using this triple pass method guys hope you got a lot of value out of this session let me know in the comments below how you're getting on with the triple pass method do you feel good swooping in and for more soft skills like this don't forget to join my exclusive facebook group fast track grad where we can directly communicate one-to-one get you guys the support that i wish i would have had as a grad to truly thrive and guys i'm gonna look forward to seeing you on the next video

Channel: Prof. David Stuckler

Views: 55,076

Keywords: research paper, reading paper, reading research, how to read research papers efficiently, how to read research papers, how to read journal articles, how to read journal articles efficiently, journal article, how to read a journal article, how to read a scientific paper, how to read a research paper, literature review

Id: WVv2jWXW0K4

Length: 9min 42sec (582 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 02 2022