如何阅读一篇论文paper-reading翻译稿

阅读论文文献的方式方法

如何阅读论文文献一、阅读论文和文献的方法（一）看课题综述先读综述，以便更好地认识课题，知道别人已经做出什么，自己要做什么，还有什么问题没有解决。

构建自己课题的大背景、大框架，了解课题的起源、发展、进展、前沿、边界等情况。

国内综述文献是迅速了解自己的研究领域的入口，在此之后，再看外文文献会比一开始直接看外文文献理解的快得多。

而综述多为本学科的资深人士撰写，涉及范围广，可以让人事半功倍。

（二）检索和选择文献针对自己的方向，查找几篇相近的论文来读，从中看懂和理解文章中回答什么问题，通过哪些技术手段来实现和证明，有哪些结论？从这些文章中，初步了解研究思路、逻辑推论、技术方法。

1、通过关键词、主题词检索：关键词、主题词要想办法选择好，这样，才能保证自己所查到的论文的准确、全面。

因为，换个主题词，肯定有不同的内容出现。

2、通过检索某个学者：可以通过查SCI，知道了某个在这个领域有建树的学者，再查找他近期发表的文章。

3、通过参考综述检索：如果有与自己课题相关或有切入点的综述，可以根据综述中相应的参考文献去找到那些原始的研究论文。

4、通过查看文献的参考价值选择文献：要读有参考价值的文献。

刊物的影响因子、文章的被引次数能反映文献的参考价值，可以查看引用这篇文章的其它文章是如何评价这篇文章的，也可以从一些文章的推荐和引用中找到有参考价值的文章。

（三）阅读论文和文献的步骤1、重视摘要：摘要可以说是一个论文的窗口。

大篇幅文章看摘要，小篇幅文章看全文。

个人感觉真正有用的全文并不多，过分追求全文是浪费，当然只看摘要也是不行的。

大篇幅文章题目、摘要简单浏览后，直接把几个图表、数值及标题与说明一看，一般能掌握大部分。

2、通读全文：读论文的第一遍的时候一定要慢、要认真，争取明白每段大意，个人认为读论文的目的并不是学语法、学英语，而是获取信息，外文论文能不查字典最好先不查字典，查字典会混乱思维，导致读完全文不知所谓。

可以在读的过程中将看不懂的段落、句子、生字词标记，待通读全文后再查找解决意思。

How to (seriously) read a scientific paper-如何认真地阅读一篇科技论文

How to (seriously) read a scientific paperBy Elisabeth Pain Mar. 21, 2016 , 1:15 PMAdam Ruben’s tongue-in-cheek column about the common difficulties and frustrations of reading a scientific paper broadly resonated among Science Careers readers. Many of you have come to us asking for more (and more serious) advice on how to make sense of the scientific literature, so we’ve asked a dozen scientists at different career stages and in a broad range of fields to tell us how they do it. Although it is clear that reading scientific papers becomes easier with experience, the stumbling blocks are real, and it is up to each scientist to identify and apply the techniques that work best for them. The responses have been edited for clarity and brevity.Do you have your own tips or other questions you’d lik e answered? Leave them in the comments section.How do you approach reading a paper?I start by reading the abstract. Then, I skim the introduction and flip through the article to look at the figures. I try to identify the most prominent one or two figures, and I really make sure I understand what's going on in them. Then, I read the conclusion/summary. Only when I have done that will I go back into the technical details to clarify any questions I might have.- Jesse Shanahan, master's candidate in astronomy at Wesleyan University in Middletown, ConnecticutThen, if the authors' research is similar to my own, I see if their relevant data match our findings or if there are any inconsistencies. If there are, I think about what could be causing them. Additionally, I think about what would happen in our model if we used the same methods as they did and what we could learn from that. Sometimes, it is also important to pay attention to why the authors decided to conduct an experiment in a certain way. Did the authors use an obscure test instead of a routine assay, and why would they do this?- Jeremy C. Borniger, doctoral candidate in neuroscience at Ohio State University, ColumbusI always start with title and abstract. That tells me whether or not it’s an article I’m interested in and whether I’ll actually be able to understand it—both scientifically and linguistically. I then read the introduction so that I can understand the question being framed, and jump right to the figures and tables so I can get a feel for the data. I then read the discussion to get an idea of how the paper fits into the general body of knowledge.I pay attention to acknowledgement of limitations and proper inference of data. Some people stretch their claims more than others, and that can be a red flag for me. I also put on my epidemiologist hat so that I can try to make sure the study design is adequate to actually test the hypotheses being examined.As I go deeper into the argument framing, figures, and discussion, I also think about which pieces are exciting and new, which ones are biologically or logically relevant, and which ones are most supported by the literature. I also consider which pieces fit with my pre-existing hypotheses and research questions.- Kevin Boehnke, doctoral candidate in environmental health sciences at the University of Michigan, Ann ArborMy reading strategy depends on the paper. Sometimes I start by skimming through to see how much might be relevant. If it is directly applicable to my current topic, I’ll read the paper closely, apart from the introduction that is probably already familiar. But I always try to figure out if there are particular places or figures that I need to pay close attention to, and then I go and read the related information in the results and discussion.I also check if there are references that I may be interested in. Sometimes I am curious to see who in the field has—or more likely has not—been referenced, to see whether the authors are choosing to ignore certain aspects of the research. I often find that the supplementary figures actually offer the most curious and interesting results, especially if the results relate to parts of the field that the authors did not reference or if they are unclear or unhelpful to their interpretation of the overall story.- Gary McDowell, postdoctoral fellow in developmental biology at Tufts Universityin Medford, Massachusetts, and visiting scholar at Boston CollegeWhen reading papers, it helps me to have a writing task so that I am being an active reader instead of letting my eyes glaze over mountains of text only to forget everything I just read. So for example, when I read for background information, I will save informative sentences from each article about a specific topic in a Word document. I'll write comments along the way about new ideas I got or questions I need to explore further. Then, in the future, I’ll only need to read this document instead of re-reading all the individual papers.Likewise, when I want to figure out how to conduct a particular experiment, I create a handy table in Excel summarizing how a variety of research teams went about doing a particular experiment.- Lina A. Colucci, doctoral candidate at the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology programI usually start with the abstract, which gives me a brief snapshot of what the study is all about. Then I read the entire article, leaving the methods to the end unless I can't make sense of the results or I'm unfamiliar with the experiments.The results and methods sections allow you to pull apart a paper to ensure it stands up to scientific rigor. Always think about the type of experiments performed, and whether these are the most appropriate to address the question proposed. Ensure that the authors have included relevant and sufficient numbers of controls. Often, conclusions can also be based on a limited number of samples, which limits their significance.I like to print out the paper and highlight the most relevant information, so on a quick rescan I can be reminded of the major points. Most relevant points would be things that change your thinking about your research topic or give you new ideas and directions.- Lachlan Gray, deputy head of the HIV Neuropathogenesis Lab at the Burnet Institute and adjunct research fellow in the Department of Infectious Disease at Monash University in Melbourne, AustraliaWhat I choose to read is based on relation to my research areas and things that are generating lots of interest and discussion because they are driving the way we do psychology, or science more widely, in new directions. Most often, what I am trying to get out of the papers is issues of methodology, experimental design, and statistical analysis. And so for me, the most important section is first what the authors did (methods) and second what they found (results).It can also be interesting to understand why the authors thought they were doing the study (introduction) and what they think the results mean (discussion). When it is an area that I know a lot about, I don't usually care much about these sectionsbecause they often reflect the authors' theoretical predilections and one of many ways to think about the method and results. But when it is an area that I know very little about, I read these closely because then I learn a lot about the assumptions and explanatory approaches in that area of research.- Brian Nosek, professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Virginia and executive director of the Center for Open Science in CharlottesvilleFirst I read very fast: The point of the first reading is simply to see whether the paper is interesting for me. If it is I read it a second time, slower and with more attention to detail.If the paper is vital to my research—and if it is theoretical—I would reinvent the paper. In such cases, I only take the starting point and then work out everything else on my own, not looking into the paper. Sometimes this is a painfully slow process. Sometimes I get angry about the authors not writing clearly enough, omitting essential points and dwelling on superfluous nonsense. Sometimes I am electrified by a paper.- Ulf Leonhardt, professor of physics at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, IsraelI nearly always read the abstract first and only continue on to the paper if the abstract indicates that the paper will be of value to me. Then, if the topic of the paper is one I know well, I generally skim the introduction, reading its last paragraph to make sure I know the specific question being addressed in the paper. Then I look at the figures and tables, either read or skim the results, and lastly skim or read the discussion.If the topic is not one I know well, I usually read the introduction much more carefully so that the study is placed into context for me. Then I skim the figures and tables and read the results.- Charles W. Fox, professor in the Department of Entomology at the University of Kentucky in LexingtonIt is important to realize that shortcuts have to be taken when reading papers so that there is time left to get our other work done, including writing, conducting research, attending meetings, teaching, and grading papers. Starting as a Ph.D. student, I have been reading the conclusions and methods of academic journal articles and chapters rather than entire books.- Rima Wilkes, professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of British Columbia, VancouverAs editor-in-chief of Science, I have to read and comprehend papers outside of my field all the time. Generally, I start with the corresponding editors’ summaries, which are meant for someone like me: a science generalist who is interested in everything but dives deeply only into one field. Next, I check to see if someone wrote a News article on the paper. Third, I check to see if there is a Perspective by another scientist. The main goal of a Perspective is to broaden the message of the paper, but often the authors do a great job of extracting the essence of the article for non-specialists at the same time.Then I tackle the abstract, which has been written to broadly communicate to the readership of the journal. Finally, I move on to the paper itself, reading, in order, the intro, conclusions, scanning the figures, and then reading the paper through.- Marcia K. McNutt, Editor-in-Chief, Science journalsWhat do you do when there is something you don’t understand?I like to read online so that I can easily cut and paste words I do n’t know into a browser to check what they mean.- McNuttIf it's only a few things in the article, I'll make a note to look them up later. If I am really struggling to proceed through the paper, I try to look up a review article or a textbook chapter to give me the necessary background to proceed, which I generally find much more efficient.There are a lot of acronyms and jargon that can be subfield-specific, so I usually don't wade through the details unless it's for my own research. But I always try to take my time to really understand the methods being used.- ShanahanI will typically pause immediately to look up things I don’t understand. The rest of the reading may not make sense if I don’t understand a key phrase or jargon. This can backfire a bit, though, as I often go down never-ending rabbit holes after looking something up (What is X? Oh, X influences Y. … So what’s Y? etc…). This can be sort of fun as you learn how everything is connected, but if you’re crunched for time this can pull your attention away from the task at hand.Sometimes, all the jargon in a paper can cloud the whole point of the experiments in the first place. In such cases, it helps to ask yourself, “What question were the authors trying to answer?” Then you can determine whe ther they succeeded or failed.- BornigerIt depends on how much the non-understandable bits prevent me from following the main ideas. I usually do not try to understand all the details in all the sections the first time I read a paper. If non-understandable parts appear important for my research, I try to ask colleagues or even contact the lead author directly. Going back to the original references to get all the background information is the last resort, because time can be limited and collaborations and personal contacts can be much more efficient in solving specific problems.- TubianaSometimes, you can just read through a paper and any terms you're not familiar with will become clearer by the end. If it is very heavy going, then stopping and seeking additional information is usually the way to go. I do a quick Google search on the topic, theme, method, jargon, etc. If it is a very dense article, sometimes it will require a few read-throughs before it all starts to make sense.- GrayThe question I ask myself is, “Do I need to understand what that means in order to get what I need from this paper?” I now read articles in research areas well outside of my expertise, and I often don't need more than superficial knowledge of the substantivecontent. If I can't do anything with the paper unless I don't understand that depth, then I do more background research.- NosekLately, I have had to read a number of papers outside my area of expertise with a lot of unfamiliar jargon. In some cases, I am able to directly extract the information I need from the results or figures and tables. In other cases, I use Google searches to define terms and concepts in the paper or read the cited references to better understand the points being made. Occasionally, papers are so incomprehensible (to me, at least) that I don't bother reading them.- FoxDo you ever feel overwhelmed reading papers, and how do you deal with that?All the time. If the paper is relevant to a problem I am trying to solve, you can be sure that there are key things in the paper that I do not understand. That confusion is not a threat; it is an opportunity. I am ignorant; I need to become less ignorant. This paper may help me.Simultaneously, some papers are written terribly and are not worth theeffort. Someone else has surely written about the concepts more clearly so that I can keep my confusion focused on understanding substance rather than poor grammar.- NosekI especially get overwhelmed if it's not in my subfield, if it's long, and if it's full of technical jargon. When this happens, I break it down into chunks and will read it over the course of a few days, if possible. For really difficult papers, it also helps to sit down and work through it with a colleague.- ShanahanYes, many times. This is why I developed my own reading strategies, by talking to other scientists and by trial and error. I also have thrown up my hands in frustration and tossed the offending papers away, never to read them again.- BoehnkeYes, and in these cases you have to realize that some papers are the result of years of work by dozens of scientists. Expecting to digest and understand everything in it in one afternoon is a far-fetched idea.- BornigerI have often felt overwhelmed! But certain sections might not need as deep an understanding as others. You also need to know your own limits: Are there some parts of the paper that you would like to emulate but are not part of your expertise and might become “accessible” through collaborations?- TubianaIf I feel the paper is very important to what I’m doing, I’ll leave it a while and go back to it again a couple of times. But if it’s too overwhelming, then I have to leave it aside, unless someone among the colleagues I have contacted has been able to interpret it.- McDowellDo you have any other tips you’d like to share?If there is a seminal paper I want to thoroughly understand, I find some way to give a journal club-style presentation about it. Speaking about a particular paper and answering questions is the best way for me to learn the material.Also, get a good reference manager. Mendeley helps me do my research, read literature, and write papers.- ColucciAt the beginning, new academic readers find it slow because they have no frame of reference for what they are reading. But there are ways to use reading as a system of creating a mental library, and after a few years, it becomes easy to slot papers onto your mental shelves. Then you can quickly skim a paper to know its contribution.- WilkesBe patient. Don’t be afraid or ashamed to use Wikipedia or other, more lay-audience sources like blog posts to get a feel for your topic. Ask many, many questions. If youcan’t get a clear understanding of the paper, talk with people in your circle. If you are still confused and it's really important to understand the concepts, email the authors.- BoehnkeD on’t hesitate to talk to more experienced scientists. You will be doing THEM afavor by having them explain to you in terms you understand what a complex paper means. All scientists need more experience translating complex concepts intocommon terms.- McNuttIf at all possible, read often. Try to keep a bibliography file with a summary of the article, any important points, even a figure or two, along with citation information.Pay attention to different ways of structuring an article, and pay attention to different styles of writing. This will help you develop a style that is effective and also unique.- ShanahanPosted in:∙scientific literature∙Advice∙Non-disciplinaryDOI: 10.1126/science.caredit.a1600047。

怎样阅读英文报刊定稿

ቤተ መጻሕፍቲ ባይዱ
• 3）连词、代词、引导词也会省略。例如： • Anne and baby are well（South China Morning Post） • Standard English：Anne and her baby are well • Far fewer pit closures and job losses likely than rumored（The Times） • Standard English：There are far fewer pit closures and job losses likely than have been rumored
熟悉新闻英语的常用词
英语报刊中经常借用人名、物名、建筑物名称乃至别名等专有名词来指代。
Madison Avenue( 美国广告业中心)麦迪逊大街美国广告业／美国商业 Mother of Presidents (总统之母)美国弗吉尼亚州或俄亥俄州 Steel City (钢城)匹兹堡市 Windy City (多风城)芝加哥市 White House(白宫)美国政府；美国总统 the City [(英国首都伦敦市中心)伦敦城] 英国商业界；英国金融界 Fleet Street (舰队街)英国新闻界 Scotland Yard (苏格兰场；伦敦警察局)伦敦警方 Elysee [(法国总统官邱)爱丽舍宫]法国政府；法国总统 Maginot Line [(第二次大战前法国所筑防御阵地体系)马其诺防线]盲目行动；迷恋于维持现状 Quai d„Orsay [(法国外交部附近地名)凯道赛码头]法国外交部；法国外交政策；法国政府 Bermuda／Bermuda Triangle [百慕大(魔鬼)三角]危险的禁区 Horn of Africa (非洲之角)索马里和埃塞俄比亚

如何阅读文稿英文作文

如何阅读文稿英文作文英文：Reading an English essay can be a daunting task, especially for non-native speakers. However, there are afew strategies that can make the process easier and more enjoyable.Firstly, it is important to read the essay slowly and carefully. Take your time to understand each sentence and paragraph before moving on to the next one. If you come across a word or phrase that you don't know, try to guessits meaning from the context or look it up in a dictionary.Secondly, it can be helpful to take notes while reading. Write down any important points or ideas that you come across, as well as any questions or uncertainties you have. This will help you to remember the content better and can also be useful if you need to discuss the essay with someone else.Thirdly, try to identify the main argument or thesis of the essay. This will help you to understand the purpose and structure of the essay, and will also make it easier to remember the content.Finally, it can be useful to read essays on topics that interest you. This will make the reading experience more enjoyable and engaging, and will also help you to learn new vocabulary and expressions related to your interests.中文：阅读英语文章可能是一个令人望而生畏的任务，尤其是对于非英语为母语的人来说。

如何看英文文献的方法-----总结

（从Ph.D到现在工作半年,发了12 篇paper, 7 篇first author.）我现在每天还保持读至少2-3 篇的文献的习惯.读文献有不同的读法.但最重要的自己总结概括这篇文献到底说了什么,否则就是白读,读的时候好像什么都明白,一合上就什么都不知道,这是读文献的大忌,既浪费时间,最重要的是,没有养成良好的习惯,导致以后不愿意读文献.1. 每次读完文献(不管是细读还是粗读), 合上文献后,想想看,文章最重要的take home message 是什么, 如果不知道,就从abstract,conclusion 里找, 并且从discuss 里最好确认一下. 这样一来, 一篇文章就过关了. take home message 其实都不会很多, 基本上是一些concepts, 如果你发现你需要记得很多,那往往是没有读到重点.2. 扩充知识面的读法, 重点读introduction, 看人家提出的问题,以及目前的进展类似的文章, 每天读一两篇,一个月内就基本上对这个领域的某个方向有个大概的了解.读好的review 也行, 但这样人容易懒惰.3. 为了写文章的读法, 读文章的时候, 尤其是看discussion 的时候,看到好的英文句型, 最好有意识的记一下,看一下作者是谁,哪篇文章,哪个期刊, 这样以后照猫画虎写的时候,效率高些.比自己在那里半天琢磨出一个句子强的多. 当然,读的多,写的多,你需要记得句型就越少.其实很简单,有意识的去总结和记亿, 就不容易忘记.科研牛人二告诉研究生怎么看文献，怎么写论文一、先看综述先读综述,可以更好地认识课题,知道已经做出什么，自己要做什么,,还有什么问题没有解决。

对于国内文献一般批评的声音很多.但它是你迅速了解你的研究领域的入口,在此之后,你再看外文文献会比一开始直接看外文文献理解的快得多。

而国外的综述多为本学科的资深人士撰写，涉及范围广，可以让人事半功倍。

二、有针对地选择文献针对你自己的方向,找相近的论文来读,从中理解文章中回答什么问题,通过哪些技术手段来证明,有哪些结论?从这些文章中,了解研究思路,逻辑推论,学习技术方法.1.关键词、主题词检索：关键词、主题词一定要选好，这样，才能保证你所要的内容的全面。

如何阅读文献——文献阅读三步法paper-reading

How to Read a PaperAugust2,2013S.KeshavDavid R.Cheriton School of Computer Science,University of WaterlooWaterloo,ON,Canadakeshav@uwaterloo.caABSTRACTResearchers spend a great deal of time reading research pa-pers.However,this skill is rarely taught,leading to much wasted eﬀort.This article outlines a practical and eﬃcient three-pass method for reading research papers.I also de-scribe how to use this method to do a literature survey. 1.INTRODUCTIONResearchers must read papers for several reasons:to re-view them for a conference or a class,to keep current in theirﬁeld,or for a literature survey of a newﬁeld.A typi-cal researcher will likely spend hundreds of hours every year reading papers.Learning to eﬃciently read a paper is a critical but rarely taught skill.Beginning graduate students,therefore,must learn on their own using trial and error.Students waste much eﬀort in the process and are frequently driven to frus-tration.For many years I have used a simple‘three-pass’approach to prevent me from drowning in the details of a paper be-fore getting a bird’s-eye-view.It allows me to estimate the amount of time required to review a set of papers.Moreover, I can adjust the depth of paper evaluation depending on my needs and how much time I have.This paper describes the approach and its use in doing a literature survey.2.THE THREE-PASS APPROACHThe key idea is that you should read the paper in up to three passes,instead of starting at the beginning and plow-ing your way to the end.Each pass accomplishes speciﬁc goals and builds upon the previous pass:The first pass gives you a general idea about the paper.The second pass lets you grasp the paper’s content,but not its details.The third pass helps you understand the paper in depth.2.1Theﬁrst passTheﬁrst pass is a quick scan to get a bird’s-eye view of the paper.You can also decide whether you need to do any more passes.This pass should take aboutﬁve to ten minutes and consists of the following steps:1.Carefully read the title,abstract,and introduction2.Read the section and sub-section headings,but ignoreeverything else3.Glance at the mathematical content(if any)to deter-mine the underlying theoretical foundations4.Read the conclusions5.Glance over the references,mentally ticking oﬀtheones you’ve already readAt the end of theﬁrst pass,you should be able to answer theﬁve Cs:1.Category:What type of paper is this?A measure-ment paper?An analysis of an existing system?A description of a research prototype?2.Context:Which other papers is it related to?Whichtheoretical bases were used to analyze the problem?3.Correctness:Do the assumptions appear to be valid?4.Contributions:What are the paper’s main contribu-tions?5.Clarity:Is the paper well written?Using this information,you may choose not to read fur-ther(and not print it out,thus saving trees).This could be because the paper doesn’t interest you,or you don’t know enough about the area to understand the paper,or that the authors make invalid assumptions.Theﬁrst pass is ade-quate for papers that aren’t in your research area,but may someday prove relevant.Incidentally,when you write a paper,you can expect most reviewers(and readers)to make only one pass over it.Take care to choose coherent section and sub-section titles and to write concise and comprehensive abstracts.If a reviewer cannot understand the gist after one pass,the paper will likely be rejected;if a reader cannot understand the high-lights of the paper afterﬁve minutes,the paper will likely never be read.For these reasons,a‘graphical abstract’that summarizes a paper with a single well-chosenﬁgure is an ex-cellent idea and can be increasingly found in scientiﬁc jour-nals.2.2The second passIn the second pass,read the paper with greater care,but ignore details such as proofs.It helps to jot down the key points,or to make comments in the margins,as you read. Dominik Grusemann from Uni Augsburg suggests that you “note down terms you didn’t understand,or questions you may want to ask the author.”If you are acting as a paper referee,these comments will help you when you are writing your review,and to back up your review during the program committee meeting.1.Look carefully at theﬁgures,diagrams and other illus-trations in the paper.Pay special attention to graphs.Are the axes properly labeled?Are results shown witherror bars,so that conclusions are statistically sig-niﬁcant?Common mistakes like these will separaterushed,shoddy work from the truly excellent.2.Remember to mark relevant unread references for fur-ther reading(this is a good way to learn more aboutthe background of the paper).The second pass should take up to an hour for an expe-rienced reader.After this pass,you should be able to grasp the content of the paper.You should be able to summarize the main thrust of the paper,with supporting evidence,to someone else.This level of detail is appropriate for a paper in which you are interested,but does not lie in your research speciality.Sometimes you won’t understand a paper even at the end of the second pass.This may be because the subject matter is new to you,with unfamiliar terminology and acronyms. Or the authors may use a proof or experimental technique that you don’t understand,so that the bulk of the pa-per is incomprehensible.The paper may be poorly written with unsubstantiated assertions and numerous forward ref-erences.Or it could just be that it’s late at night and you’re tired.You can now choose to:(a)set the paper aside,hoping you don’t need to understand the material to be successful in your career,(b)return to the paper later,perhaps after reading background material or(c)persevere and go on to the third pass.2.3The third passTo fully understand a paper,particularly if you are re-viewer,requires a third pass.The key to the third pass is to attempt to virtually re-implement the paper:that is, making the same assumptions as the authors,re-create the work.By comparing this re-creation with the actual paper, you can easily identify not only a paper’s innovations,but also its hidden failings and assumptions.This pass requires great attention to detail.You should identify and challenge every assumption in every statement. Moreover,you should think about how you yourself would present a particular idea.This comparison of the actual with the virtual lends a sharp insight into the proof and presentation techniques in the paper and you can very likely add this to your repertoire of tools.During this pass,you should also jot down ideas for future work.This pass can take many hours for beginners and more than an hour or two even for an experienced reader.At the end of this pass,you should be able to reconstruct the entire structure of the paper from memory,as well as be able to identify its strong and weak points.In particular,you should be able to pinpoint implicit assumptions,missing citations to relevant work,and potential issues with experimental or analytical techniques.3.DOING A LITERATURE SURVEYPaper reading skills are put to the test in doing a literature survey.This will require you to read tens of papers,perhaps in an unfamiliarﬁeld.What papers should you read?Here is how you can use the three-pass approach to help.First,use an academic search engine such as Google Scholar or CiteSeer and some well-chosen keywords toﬁnd three to ﬁve recent highly-cited papers in the area.Do one pass on each paper to get a sense of the work,then read their re-lated work sections.You willﬁnd a thumbnail summary ofthe recent work,and perhaps,if you are lucky,a pointer toa recent survey paper.If you canﬁnd such a survey,youare done.Read the survey,congratulating yourself on your good luck.Otherwise,in the second step,ﬁnd shared citations and repeated author names in the bibliography.These are thekey papers and researchers in that area.Download the key papers and set them aside.Then go to the websites of thekey researchers and see where they’ve published recently. That will help you identify the top conferences in thatﬁeld because the best researchers usually publish in the top con-ferences.The third step is to go to the website for these top con-ferences and look through their recent proceedings.A quick scan will usually identify recent high-quality related work. These papers,along with the ones you set aside earlier,con-stitute theﬁrst version of your survey.Make two passes through these papers.If they all cite a key paper that youdid notﬁnd earlier,obtain and read it,iterating as neces-sary.4.RELATED WORKIf you are reading a paper to do a review,you should also read Timothy Roscoe’s paper on“Writing reviews for sys-tems conferences”[3].If you’re planning to write a technical paper,you should refer both to Henning Schulzrinne’s com-prehensive web site[4]and George Whitesides’s excellent overview of the process[5].Finally,Simon Peyton Joneshas a website that covers the entire spectrum of research skills[2].Iain H.McLean of Psychology,Inc.has put together a downloadable‘review matrix’that simpliﬁes paper review-ing using the three-pass approach for papers in experimen-tal psychology[1],which can probably be used,with minor modiﬁcations,for papers in other areas.5.ACKNOWLEDGMENTSTheﬁrst version of this document was drafted by my stu-dents:Hossein Falaki,Earl Oliver,and Sumair Ur Rahman.My thanks to them.I also beneﬁted from Christophe Diot’s perceptive comments and Nicole Keshav’s eagle-eyed copy-editing.I would like to make this a living document,updating itas I receive comments.Please take a moment to email meany comments or suggestions for improvement.Thanks to encouraging feedback from many correspondents over the years.6.REFERENCES[1]I.H.McLean,“Literature Review Matrix,”/[2]S.Peyton Jones,“Research Skills,”/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers/giving-a-talk/giving-a-talk.htm[3]T.Roscoe,“Writing Reviews for Systems Conferences,”http://people.inf.ethz.ch/troscoe/pubs/review-writing.pdf[4]H.Schulzrinne,“Writing Technical Articles,”/∼hgs/etc/writing-style.html[5]G.M.Whitesides,“Whitesides’Group:Writing a Paper,”/∼rlake/Whitesides writing res paper.pdf。

如何阅读文献how to read a research paper

How to read a research paper.Later in the semester,we will talk about how to write a research paper.To begin the course,however,we consider how to read a research paper.This discussion presupposes that you have a good reason to carefully read a research paper–for example,the fact that I assign a paper is(probably)a good reason for you to read it.You may also need to carefully read a paper if you are asked to review it,or if it is relevant to your own research.We might also later discuss how to skim a paper,so that you can decide whether a paper is worth a careful reading.When you read a research paper,your goal is to understand the scientiﬁc contributions the authors are making.This is not an easy task.1It may require going over the paper several times.Expect to spend several hours to read a paper.Here are some initial guidelines for how to read a paper:Read critically:Reading a research paper must be a critical process.You should not assume that the authors are always correct.Instead,be suspicious.Critical reading involves asking appropriate questions.If the authors attempt to solve a problem,are they solving the right problem?Are there simple solutions the authors do not seem to have considered?What are the limitations of the solution(including limitations the authors might not have noticed or clearly admitted)?Are the assumptions the authors make reasonable?Is the logic of the paper clear and justiﬁable,given the assumptions,or is there aﬂaw in the reasoning?If the authors present data,did they gather the right data to substantiate their argument,and did they appear to gather it in the correct manner?Did they interpret the data in a reasonable manner?Would other data be more compelling?Read creatively:Reading a paper critically is easy,in that it is always easier to tear something down than to build it up.Reading creatively involves harder,more positive thinking.What are the good ideas in this paper?Do these ideas have other applications or extensions that the authors might not have thought of?Can they be generalized further?Are there possible improvements that might make important practical differences?If you were going to start doing research from this paper,what would be the next thing you would do?Make notes as you read the paper:Many people cover the margins of their copies of papers with e whatever style you prefer.If you have questions or criticisms,write them down so you do not forget them.Underline key points the authors make.Mark the data that is most important or that appears questionable.Such efforts help the ﬁrst time you read a paper and pay big dividends when you have to re-read a paper after several months.1It would be easier if more research papers were well written...but again,we will discuss writing later on.After theﬁrst read-through,try to summarize the paper in one or two sentences.Almost all good research papers try to provide an answer a speciﬁc question.(Sometimes the question isa natural one that people speciﬁcally set out to answer;sometimes a good idea just ends up answering aworthwhile question.)If you can succinctly describe a paper,you have probably recognized the question the authors started with with and the answer they provide.Once you have focused on the main idea,you can go back and try to outline the paper to gain insight into more speciﬁc details.Indeed,if summarizing the paper in one or two sentences is easy,go back and try to deepen your outline by summarizing the three or four most important subpoints of the main idea.If possible,compare the paper to other works.Summarizing the paper is one way to try to determine the scientiﬁc contribution of a paper.But to really guage the scientiﬁc merit,you must compare the paper to other works in the area.Are the ideas really novel,or have they appeared before?(Of course we do not expect you to be experts and know the areas ahead of time in this class!)It is worth mentioning that scientiﬁc contributions can take on many forms.Some papers offer new ideas;others implement ideas,and show how they work;others bring previous ideas together and unite them under a novel framework.Knowing other work in the area can help you to determine which sort of contribution a paper is actually making.For this class,I will often ask you to provide a short,one page review of a paper.Although this may sound like a simple assignment,I expect that it will take a signiﬁcant amount of time,especially in the beginning. (Remember,I am expecting it to take several hours just to read the paper!)Keeping the above in mind as you read the paper should make the process easier.Your one page review should include the following:a one or two sentence summary of the paper.a deeper,more extensive outline of the main points of the paper,including for example assumptionsmade,arguments presented,data analyzed,and conclusions drawn.any limitations or extensions you see for the ideas in the paper.your opinion of the paper;primarily,the quality of the ideas and its potential impact.。

paper-reading is suggestive -回复

paper-reading is suggestive -回复这里是一份1500-2000字的文章，主题为"[paper reading is suggestive]。

"在当今快速发展的信息时代，有关纸质阅读的讨论成为热点之一。

纸质阅读相对于数字阅读，拥有自身的独特优势，其中之一便是纸质书籍具有"建议性"。

本文将一步一步回答"[paper reading is suggestive]"这个主题，并深入探讨纸质阅读与数字阅读之间的差异。

首先，我们需要了解纸质阅读的特点。

纸质阅读是传统的阅读方式，它要求读者亲手翻动纸张，感受书页间的质感和纹理。

这种亲身体验以及与纸质书籍的互动让读者更加沉浸于阅读过程中。

与此相对应的是数字阅读，其抽象的界面以及无形的页面无法给读者带来与纸质阅读相同的触感体验。

其次，纸质阅读对读者的建议性影响体现在多个方面。

首先，纸质书籍通过独特的布局设计和排版，向读者传达作者的观点并引导读者对文本内容进行理解。

例如，书籍的标题、副标题以及章节标题可以告诉读者内容的大致思路。

此外，纸质书籍还可以通过调整字体大小、颜色以及文字的排列方式来突出重要信息，从而帮助读者更好地理解和记忆。

另外，纸质阅读还通过可触摸性给读者带来良好的阅读体验。

拿起一本厚厚的书或翻动书页的感觉会让人感到满足和愉悦。

而且，纸质书籍的封面、插图和书签等可视元素也为读者提供了额外的信息和视觉上的享受。

这些因素综合起来，使得纸质阅读具有更多层次的建议性。

然而，数字阅读也有自己的优势。

数字阅读提供了更加便捷的方式来获取和浏览大量信息。

通过电子设备，用户可以随时随地访问各种数字图书馆和学术数据库，从而获得广泛的阅读资源。

此外，数字阅读还可以提供便利的搜索和标注功能，使读者能够快速找到所需内容并进行整理和注释。

这种快捷性和便利性使得数字阅读在某些场景下更具建议性。

尽管如此，纸质阅读与数字阅读之间的讨论并不是互斥的。

HowtoReadaScientificArticle（如何阅读科学论文）

HowtoReadaScientificArticle（如何阅读科学论文）How to Critically Read a Scientific PaperA general strategy for reading and understanding a scientific paper is to read the material critically. There are two underlying themes to this strategy. First, one must ask his/her own questions about the material (i.e. about the methods, data, figures, concept, etc.), and attempt to answer them after careful analysis of the paper. Second, one must integrate the information from the paper into his/her own larger body of knowledge. This second theme is most suc cessfully accomplished by drawing a graphic model of the “new reality” which the paper reveals.Step 1. Looking at the PicturesBefore you begin reading the paper look at and try to understand each figure, table and graph. This is the focal point of the paper. The text will eventually help you to understand them completely, but this step will put you in “Question Asking Mode” and will help you to get started on your critical examination of the paper.1.Look at each figure, graph, or table and try to understand what is being presented.Read the figure legends and notes associated with each piece of data.2.Make brief notes on what you do understand about each figure (i.e. what is beingmeasured? What technique was used to generate the data? What were theindependent variables, dependent variables and controls?). Determine if youunderstand the concept behind the different techniquesused to generate the data.If you do not then make sure you learn about them before you even attempt toread the paper (i.e. go to your textbooks).3.For anything (and everything) that you don’t understand, write an explicitquestion (i.e. What is that smallest band in Lane 3 on this protein gel? or Whydoes the mutant strain have the highest enzyme activity?). Try to answer yourown questions (take a stab at it) based on what you know.4.After you finish looking at the pictures, tables and graphs make a guess aboutwhat methods you expect to see described in the materials and methods section.Write these down. Once again, if you do not understand any of these techniquesthen do some research before you begin reading the paper. It is very difficult totry to understand research wh en you don’t know how it was done.Step 2. Read through once.1.Read the paper from beginning to end.2.Mark or highlight every place where one of your earlier questions is answered.3.Formulate new questions about things you do not understand. Make sure you arevery specific in your questions (i.e. don’t just write, huh?).Step 3. Critical AnalysisEvery scientific paper is like a narrative of things that theresearchers thought and did. The formal structure of a modern paper (i.e. Title, Abstract, Materials and Methods, Results, Discussion) obscures the thought process that directed the research, but this process can be rediscovered by careful examination. This step is extremely important in order to understand the material.Steps in the critical analysis:1.Significant prior knowledge/current ignorance. What specific information(from earlier work) formed the basis for the experiments reported in the paper.You can usually find this information in the introduction. In your own wordsstate what is known about the research and what is still unknown.2.The Main Hypothesis and Alternatives. All research is directed by a hypothesisand one or more alternative hypotheses. In your own words, state all of thehypotheses directing the research.3.Assumptions (Explicit and Implicit). Often the authors will tell you that theyassumed something would (or would not) affect their experimental results. Thisis an explicit assumption. Authors also imply some assumptions (implicitassumptions). These are rather subtle. An example might be that they assumeOhm’s Law was working when they ran the electrophoresis, or that there are noplasmids in a strain if plasmid DNA cannot be isolated from the strain. Identifyall of the assumptions (implicit and explicit) made and state why you agree ordisagree with them.Note: Hypotheses are things that are tested in the research and assumptions are things that are not tested. Learn to distinguish between them.4.Elements of Support or non-support. Questions are answered and hypothesesare either supported or not supported using experimental procedures (i.e. by thedata). Look at the data again and re-read the materials and methods section andthe results section. Were the methods appropriate? Did they offer evidence tosupport the hypothesis? Was the data interpreted correctly? For example, was the gel band seen in lane 1 really brighter than the control or would you interpretsomething differently. It is important to not assume that just because a paper was published that it is the gospel truth. Remember that you are training to be ascientist; therefore, you need to be convinced that the data supports the hypothesis.5.Change in Reality? Did the data support any of the hypotheses? Be able toexplain why or why not. Was this work a significant contribution to science orjust a small contribution? Can this research be applicable to some greater cause?How does this work change our understanding? Draw a graphical model showing what was considered correct before the work was done and draw a model showing what is now considered correct after the work was done. Examine how the twomodels differ (if at all).6.The Next Step. When a hypothesis is supported there is always another questionthat arises. This is a natural occurrence in scientific research. State one or a fewnew questions that come to your mind. Predict what new set of experiments canbe done to answer the new questions. Are there any new experiments can be done to give further support for the previous hypothesis?。

how to read a paper

2004年复旦大学生物医学前沿文献讨论课参考资料1 HOW TO EVALUATE A PAPERA thorough understanding and evaluation of a paper involves answering severalquestions:a. What questions does the paper address?b. What are the main conclusions of the paper?c. What evidence supports those conclusions?d. Do the data actually support the conclusions?e. What is the quality of the evidence?f. Why are the conclusions important?a. What questions does the paper address?Before addressing this question, we need to be aware that research in biochemistry andmolecular biology can be of several different types:Type of research Question asked:Descriptive What is there? What do we see?Comparative How does it compare to other organisms? Areour findings general?Analytical How does it work? What is the mechanism? Descriptive research often takes place in the early stages of our understanding of a system. We can't formulate hypotheses about how a system works, or what its interconnections are, until we know what is there. Typical descriptive approaches in molecular biology are DNA sequencing and DNA microarray approaches. In biochemistry, one could regard x-ray crystallography as a descriptive endeavor.Comparative research often takes place when we are asking how general a finding is. Is it specific to my particular organism, or is it broadly applicable? A typical comparative approach would be comparing the sequence of a gene from one organism with that from the other organisms in which that gene is found. One example of this is the observation that the actin genes from humans and budding yeast are 89% identical and 96% similar. Analytical research generally takes place when we know enough to begin formulating hypotheses about how a system works, about how the parts are interconnected, and what the causal connections are. A typical analytical approach would be to devise two (or more) alternative hypotheses about how a system operates. These hypotheses would all be consistent with current knowledge about the system. Ideally, the approach would devise a set of experiments todistinguish among these hypotheses. A classic example is the Meselson-Stahl experiment.Of course, many papers are a combination of these approaches. For instance, researchers might sequence a gene from their model organism; compare its sequence to homologous genes from other organisms; use this comparison to devise a hypothesis for the function of the gene product; and test this hypothesis by making a site-directed change in the gene and asking how that affects the phenotype of the organism and/or the biochemical function of the gene product.Being aware that not all papers have the same approach can orient you towards recognizing the major questions that a paper addresses.What are these questions? In a well-written paper, as described above, the Introduction generally goes from the general to the specific, eventually framing a question or set of questions. This is a good starting place. In addition, the results of experiments usually raise additional questions, which the authors may attempt to answer. These questions usually become evident only in the Results section.b. What are the main conclusions of the paper?This question can often be answered in a preliminary way by studying the abstract of the paper. Here the authors highlight what they think are the key points. This is not enough, because abstracts often have severe space constraints, but it can serve as a starting point. Still, you need to read the paper with this question in mind.c. What evidence supports those conclusions?Generally, you can get a pretty good idea about this from the Results section. The description of the findings points to the relevant tables and figures. This is easiest when there is one primary experiment to support a point. However, it is often the case that several different experiments or approaches combine to support a particular conclusion. For example, the first experiment might have several possible interpretations, and the later ones are designed to distinguish among these.In the ideal case, the Discussion begins with a section of the form "Three lines of evidence provide support for the conclusion that... First, ...Second,... etc." However, difficulties can arise when the paper is poorly written (see above). The authors often do not present a concise summary of this type, leaving you to make it yourself. A skeptic might argue that in such cases the logical structure of the argument is weak and is omitted on purpose! In any case, you need to be sure that you understand the relationship between the data and the conclusions.d. Do the data actually support the conclusions?2004年复旦大学生物医学前沿文献讨论课参考资料1One major advantage of doing this is that it helps you to evaluate whether the conclusion is sound. If we assume for the moment that the data are believable (see next section), it still might be the case that the data do not actually support the conclusion the authors wish to reach. There are at least two different ways this can happen:i. The logical connection between the data and the interpretation is not soundii. There might be other interpretations that might be consistent with the data.One important aspect to look for is whether the authors take multiple approaches to answering a question. Do they have multiple lines of evidence, from different directions, supporting their conclusions? If there is only one line of evidence, it is more likely that it could be interpreted in a different way; multiple approaches make the argument more persuasive.Another thing to look for is implicit or hidden assumptions used by the authors in interpreting their data. This can be hard to do, unless you understand the field thoroughly.e. What is the quality of that evidence?This is the hardest question to answer, for novices and experts alike. At the same time, it is one of the most important skills to learn as a young scientist. It involves a major reorientation from being a relatively passive consumer of information and ideas to an active producer and critical evaluator of them. This is not easy and takes years to master. Beginning scientists often wonder, "Who am I to question these authorities? After all the paper was published in a top journal, so the authors must have a high standing, and the work must have received a critical review by experts." Unfortunately, that's not always the case. In any case, developing your ability to evaluate evidence is one of the hardest and most important aspects of learning to be a critical scientist and reader.How can you evaluate the evidence?First, you need to understand thoroughly the methods used in the experiments. Often these are described poorly or not at all. The details are often missing, but more importantly the authors usually assume that the reader has a general knowledge of common methods in the field (such as immunoblotting, cloning, genetic methods, or DNase I footprinting). If you lack this knowledge, as discussed above you have to make the extra effort to inform yourself about the basic methodology before you can evaluate the data.Sometimes you have to go to the library, or to a lab that has a lot of back issues of common journals, to trace back the details of the methods if they are important. One new development that eventually will make this much easier is the increasing availability of journals on the Web. Second, you need to know the limitations of the methodology. Every method has limitations, and if the experiments are not done correctly they can't be interpreted.For instance, an immunoblot is not a very quantitative method.Moreover, in a certain range of protein the signal increases (that is, thesignal is at least roughly "linear"), but above a certain amount ofprotein the signal no longer increases. Therefore, to use this methodcorrectly one needs a standard curve that shows that the experimentallanes are in a linear range. Often, the authors will not show thisstandard curve, but they should state that such curves were done. Ifyou don't see such an assertion, it could of course result from badwriting, but it might also not have been done. If it wasn't done, a darkband might mean "there is this much protein or an indefinite amountmore".Third, you need to distinguish between what the data show and what the authors say they show. The latter is really an interpretation on the authors' part, though it is generally not stated to be an interpretation. Papers usually state something like "the data in Fig. x show that ...". This is the authors' interpretation of the data. Do you interpret it the same way? You need to look carefully at the data to ensure that they really do show what the authors say they do. You can only do this effectively if you understand the methods and their limitations.Fourth, it is often helpful to look at the original journal (or its electronic counterpart) instead of a photocopy. Particularly for half-tone figures such as photos of gels or autoradiograms, the contrast is distorted, usually increased, by photocopying, so that the data are misrepresented.Fifth, you should ask if the proper controls are present. Controls tell us that nature is behaving the way we expect it to under the conditions of the experiment. If the controls are missing, it is harder to be confident that the results really show what is happening in the experiment. You should try to develop the habit of asking "where are the controls?" and looking for them.f. Why are the conclusions important?Do the conclusions make a significant advance in our knowledge? Do they lead to new insights, or even new research directions?Again, answering these questions requires that you understand the field relatively well. (John W. L ittle and Roy Parker--University of Arizona)2004年复旦大学生物医学前沿文献讨论课参考资料2Dr. Plopper’s Guide To Critical Reading of Primary Literature Overall tips:1. Just because a scientific study has been published, this does not mean it is perfect. And the imperfections are not so minute that a non-expert cannot find them. Any student of science can, and indeed should, read science critically. This means you can read a paper by a Nobel laureate and find fault with it. It is in fact expected that, as a practicing scientist, you can criticize any science. The level of your critical analysis will differ with your experience level, but you should be able to criticize science even as a relatively inexperienced undergraduate.2. Manuscripts are not read the same way newspapers or novels are read. One does not simply read every word, from the front to the back, in a single pass. The reason for this is fairly obvious: manuscripts contain a high density of information, and not all of this information is of equal value to the reader. In fact, quite a lot of effort is made by the authors and editors to break the information into discrete units that can be read almost independently. Inexperienced readers of primary literature should pay close attention to how manuscripts are organized, and seek specific types of information from each section. You should read the manuscript many times, but each time read only a portion of it, and do so because you are looking for specific information.3. Have a good textbook handy to look up background information and definitions.4. Reading a manuscript takes a lot of time, especially if you are unused to it. To do all of the procedures outlined here will take you at least three hours.Step-by-step method:1. Read the Title.1a. Understand each word. The title provides the most important information in the manuscript. What, really, does this mean? This means the authors have combed through their data and have decided that if you remember nothing else about the paper, this is the one thing you should remember. You may be surprised to learn that most authors spend quite a lot of effort on the title, because they are forced to distil many months (or even years) of work into a single sentence. Imagine crunching an entire year of college courses into a single sentence! As a result, they shuffle and reshuffle their data until the most important point comes out. They also shuffle and reshuffle the words in the title.The result is that each word in a title usually carries a lot of weight. Because a lot of effort is put into creating a title, it should be rich in information content. To the reader, this means you should be able to get a lot of ideas out of the title. I usually spend at least five (real) minutes thinking about the title before I read anything else; most beginning students spend about five seconds on a title, figuring, “If it’s important, I’ll learn about it later in the paper.” Bad idea!1b. Create a list of experiments you expect to see in the paper. In practical terms, this means you should consider the implications of each word in a title. You should be able to derive a list of what sort of experiments you think the authors performed, what the data might have looked like, and how the authors reached their conclusions, before you even read the paper. Write this list down. It may be completely wrong, that’s OK. But try to think ahead about what will be coming. If eventually you discover that your list looks nothing like what the authors did, that is very instructional: did you miss a critical point, or (this happens) did they? Did they mislead you with their title? Many papers have titles that border on being advertisements: they paint the data in the most positive light, but may not be entirely accurate. Your job is to see through that!Example: Although not usually written as a declarative sentence, a title can be translated as such.Here is an example from a cell biology paper: “A Splice-Isoform of Vesicle-associated Membrane Protein-1 (VAMP-1) Contains a Mitochondrial Targeting Signal.” This sentence can be deconstructed easily: “X (verb) Y.” The verb “contains” is not overly scientific, but is has implications you should consider. The “X” in this case is rich in terms: “A Splice-Isoform of Vesicle-associated Membrane Protein-1…” When you read a title, make sure you understand what every single word means, or at least ask yourself how you could find out. In this case, if you don’t know what “splice isoform” means, go find out before you delve any deeper into the paper, because it must be a critical component of the whole manuscript (or it wouldn’t have made it into the title, right?). Usually a good place to find definitions or explanations for especially obscure words is the Introduction section. Likewise the words “vesicle-associated,” “membrane,” and “protein.” These are all very common terms in cell biology, and you should have no trouble understanding them. After you get the meaning of each word down, string them together and determine what they mean collectively. In this case, it means, “A structurally altered form of a protein that binds to vesicles…” and that should conjure an image in your mind: what do vesicle associated proteins do? Don’t know? Go find out. What would make them interesting, especially if they were structurally altered? Any predictions? I’ll wager that you won’t predict that they have anything to do with mitochondria. Hmmm….Do the same deconstruction to the “Y” term: what is a “mitochondrial targeting signal”? Where is it found? What does it do? Look it up if you don’t know.Now combine the two ideas with the verb. The two apparently disparate ideas are actually related, according to this paper. How would you show that? Spend some time thinking hard about that. Any idea how someone might do it? If so, write it down. If not, put down the questions you’d need answered in order to come up with some experiments: “How do you show something is a splice variant?” for example.So, before proceeding, you should have a list: It either has a series of experiments you think might be done, or it has a set of questions that you need answers to in order to generate that list of experiments. Maybe it contains a few statements of each type. A big difference between an inexperienced and an experienced researcher is how easily they can draw up this list of experiments. You should be striving to do this as quickly and thoroughly as possible. And remember: having a list that varies from the list of actual experiments done by the authors is perfectly OK.If you need to look in the paper to find the answers to your list of questions, do that next. Look at the data/figures, and check the Materials and Methods for the “how to” portion of addressing your question. Read these sections only for that information! Do not get bogged down in minute details: know what you are looking for, and find it. Skip/ignore anything that doesn’t answer your questions. Then, generate your list of experiments.Do not read any more of the paper until you get this list together. I usually just abbreviate it in the2004年复旦大学生物医学前沿文献讨论课参考资料2margin of the first page. At this point all you have read is the title (plus maybe you’ve skimmed the rest), yet you have a good handle on what the paper should be about, and even a set of expectations to bring with you as you delve into the meat of the paper. This will help considerably when trying to decide what else in the paper really matters: Sometimes the pH of a buffer is boring, sometimes it is crucial.Given the list, now you can test your ideas by reading the rest of the paper to find out what experiments they actually did. How and where do you find that? In the Results section.But before we go there, let’s get a preview by reading a summary of the results in the abstract.2. Read the Abstract.The abstract is a summary of the whole paper. It usually contains a condensed introduction (1-2 sentences) explaining the rationale for the work. Then a brief summary of the data, with slight reference to the experimental methods at best. Finally, a concluding sentence, perhaps with mention of the implications of the work.Like the title, the abstract is a dense piece of writing. You can get lots of info here, but this time you are looking only for hints as to how and why the experiments were performed. You can then tell how close your list is to theirs. Don’t rewrite your list! Just get it in your head that your experiments and theirs are either similar or not. You will also get a sense for the order in which experiments are going to be presented. Ignore everything else.3. Read the Results section.3a. Read the text of the results without critiquing the data. Go slowly and carefully here. Since this is your first pass through the data, do not try to take it all in at once. Again, look for specific information and ignore the rest. This time, you are looking for a good understanding of what the experiments were: what did they do? The goal here is to get into the minds of the authors: Let them tell you why they did the experiments, and what they think happened as a result. Assume everything they tell you is the absolute truth. This is where you compare your list with theirs. Write down what differences there are, and note why you think the lists are different: are the authors leaving things out you’d like to see, or are they on a different track than you? The key here is to fully understand their train of thought. If you can’t figure it out, write that down, too, specifying exactly where you fell off the train. Then move on. From here on, focus on the material you understand from the Results, and ignore what you don’t understand.3b. Look at the figures and carefully read the figure legends. This is where you get into the nitty-gritty of the paper. Look at each figure, having already understood what the authors claim is happening. BE CRITICAL: Assume they are trying to pull a fast one on you. Make sure that when they say something, the data actually show it. You may be surprised to learn that many papers fail in this respect, sometimes rather badly. Scientists often give themselves the benefit of the doubt, and your job here is to see whether you’d give them the same breaks. It is perfectly OK to be a complete stickler for facts: what are the controls for that experiment? How do you know that this result isn’t due to something else? [Note: This is the one and only time you ever need to read the Materials and Methods section, and you only read it when you need a specific fact about a particular item. Do not dwell in the M&M section.] Challenge yourself to find alternate explanations for the results. An important thing to realize is that you can do this for every single paper ever published. All authors omit things, because they can’t publish every experiment they ever did: what do you think they chose to omit? Why did they omit it?Make sure you understand what they did before moving on. I sometimes have a list, next to my “expected experiments” list.4. Read the introduction.Now, you are looking for a clear justification for why the authors chose to do their experiments. What is the main question that they claim to be answering? Amazingly, some papers never mention this, and the authors assume that we’ll just “get it.” Bad idea! Are you convinced that their question is relevant/interesting?5. Compare the authors’ main question, their data, and their conclusions.Simply put, did they answer their question? Did they do the right experiments to address their question? If your list of experiments differs from theirs, is their line of experimentation better? Sometimes it isn’t! If you had to answer this research question, knowing all that you know now, how would you do it? Maybe borrow some of their experiments? Or do exactly what they did? Great papers are those that do it exactly right, and they are rare.6. Read the discussion.Having reached your own conclusions about the quality of the work, let them have the last say by reading their defense of their work. The discussion should tell you why their work is important, and how it advances the field. By the time you read this, you will have a clear understanding of what you think the weaknesses of the paper are: did they anticipate your questions, and actually answer them here? If so, consider their response. If not, you get the satisfaction of knowing that you been especially thorough in your reading and critical evaluation of the manuscript.7. Project into the future.Having now gotten into the minds of the authors, imagine yourself working along side them. If you joined that lab tomorrow, what would you suggest be done next to advance this study? Are there gaping holes to be filled? Or can you move on to the next issue? To be a critical scientist, you must be able to answer these questions. You may find yourself in a lab one day, or maybe in an interview, where you will be asked, “What would you do next?” and reading manuscripts is where you begin thinking along these lines. Do not neglect this responsibility.8. Wrap up.Give the whole paper a quick read from front-to-back, and see how the paper flows. Look for style, not content. What phrases do they use to introduce their ideas? How are the figures labeled? Is this a well-constructed paper? Is there anything in the paper you'd like to emulate?Send comments to: ploppg@。

paper-reading文献阅读方法

How to Read a PaperAugust2,2013S.KeshavDavid R.Cheriton School of Computer Science,University of WaterlooWaterloo,ON,Canadakeshav@uwaterloo.caABSTRACTResearchers spend a great deal of time reading research pa-pers.However,this skill is rarely taught,leading to much wasted eﬀort.This article outlines a practical and eﬃcient three-pass method for reading research papers.I also de-scribe how to use this method to do a literature survey. 1.INTRODUCTIONResearchers must read papers for several reasons:to re-view them for a conference or a class,to keep current in theirﬁeld,or for a literature survey of a newﬁeld.A typi-cal researcher will likely spend hundreds of hours every year reading papers.Learning to eﬃciently read a paper is a critical but rarely taught skill.Beginning graduate students,therefore,must learn on their own using trial and error.Students waste much eﬀort in the process and are frequently driven to frus-tration.For many years I have used a simple‘three-pass’approach to prevent me from drowning in the details of a paper be-fore getting a bird’s-eye-view.It allows me to estimate the amount of time required to review a set of papers.Moreover, I can adjust the depth of paper evaluation depending on my needs and how much time I have.This paper describes the approach and its use in doing a literature survey.2.THE THREE-PASS APPROACHThe key idea is that you should read the paper in up to three passes,instead of starting at the beginning and plow-ing your way to the end.Each pass accomplishes speciﬁc goals and builds upon the previous pass:The first pass gives you a general idea about the paper.The second pass lets you grasp the paper’s content,but not its details.The third pass helps you understand the paper in depth.2.1Theﬁrst passTheﬁrst pass is a quick scan to get a bird’s-eye view of the paper.You can also decide whether you need to do any more passes.This pass should take aboutﬁve to ten minutes and consists of the following steps:1.Carefully read the title,abstract,and introduction2.Read the section and sub-section headings,but ignoreeverything else3.Glance at the mathematical content(if any)to deter-mine the underlying theoretical foundations4.Read the conclusions5.Glance over the references,mentally ticking oﬀtheones you’ve already readAt the end of theﬁrst pass,you should be able to answer theﬁve Cs:1.Category:What type of paper is this?A measure-ment paper?An analysis of an existing system?A description of a research prototype?2.Context:Which other papers is it related to?Whichtheoretical bases were used to analyze the problem?3.Correctness:Do the assumptions appear to be valid?4.Contributions:What are the paper’s main contribu-tions?5.Clarity:Is the paper well written?Using this information,you may choose not to read fur-ther(and not print it out,thus saving trees).This could be because the paper doesn’t interest you,or you don’t know enough about the area to understand the paper,or that the authors make invalid assumptions.Theﬁrst pass is ade-quate for papers that aren’t in your research area,but may someday prove relevant.Incidentally,when you write a paper,you can expect most reviewers(and readers)to make only one pass over it.Take care to choose coherent section and sub-section titles and to write concise and comprehensive abstracts.If a reviewer cannot understand the gist after one pass,the paper will likely be rejected;if a reader cannot understand the high-lights of the paper afterﬁve minutes,the paper will likely never be read.For these reasons,a‘graphical abstract’that summarizes a paper with a single well-chosenﬁgure is an ex-cellent idea and can be increasingly found in scientiﬁc jour-nals.2.2The second passIn the second pass,read the paper with greater care,but ignore details such as proofs.It helps to jot down the key points,or to make comments in the margins,as you read. Dominik Grusemann from Uni Augsburg suggests that you “note down terms you didn’t understand,or questions you may want to ask the author.”If you are acting as a paper referee,these comments will help you when you are writing your review,and to back up your review during the program committee meeting.1.Look carefully at theﬁgures,diagrams and other illus-trations in the paper.Pay special attention to graphs.Are the axes properly labeled?Are results shown witherror bars,so that conclusions are statistically sig-niﬁcant?Common mistakes like these will separaterushed,shoddy work from the truly excellent.2.Remember to mark relevant unread references for fur-ther reading(this is a good way to learn more aboutthe background of the paper).The second pass should take up to an hour for an expe-rienced reader.After this pass,you should be able to grasp the content of the paper.You should be able to summarize the main thrust of the paper,with supporting evidence,to someone else.This level of detail is appropriate for a paper in which you are interested,but does not lie in your research speciality.Sometimes you won’t understand a paper even at the end of the second pass.This may be because the subject matter is new to you,with unfamiliar terminology and acronyms. Or the authors may use a proof or experimental technique that you don’t understand,so that the bulk of the pa-per is incomprehensible.The paper may be poorly written with unsubstantiated assertions and numerous forward ref-erences.Or it could just be that it’s late at night and you’re tired.You can now choose to:(a)set the paper aside,hoping you don’t need to understand the material to be successful in your career,(b)return to the paper later,perhaps after reading background material or(c)persevere and go on to the third pass.2.3The third passTo fully understand a paper,particularly if you are re-viewer,requires a third pass.The key to the third pass is to attempt to virtually re-implement the paper:that is, making the same assumptions as the authors,re-create the work.By comparing this re-creation with the actual paper, you can easily identify not only a paper’s innovations,but also its hidden failings and assumptions.This pass requires great attention to detail.You should identify and challenge every assumption in every statement. Moreover,you should think about how you yourself would present a particular idea.This comparison of the actual with the virtual lends a sharp insight into the proof and presentation techniques in the paper and you can very likely add this to your repertoire of tools.During this pass,you should also jot down ideas for future work.This pass can take many hours for beginners and more than an hour or two even for an experienced reader.At the end of this pass,you should be able to reconstruct the entire structure of the paper from memory,as well as be able to identify its strong and weak points.In particular,you should be able to pinpoint implicit assumptions,missing citations to relevant work,and potential issues with experimental or analytical techniques.3.DOING A LITERATURE SURVEYPaper reading skills are put to the test in doing a literature survey.This will require you to read tens of papers,perhaps in an unfamiliarﬁeld.What papers should you read?Here is how you can use the three-pass approach to help.First,use an academic search engine such as Google Scholar or CiteSeer and some well-chosen keywords toﬁnd three to ﬁve recent highly-cited papers in the area.Do one pass on each paper to get a sense of the work,then read their re-lated work sections.You willﬁnd a thumbnail summary ofthe recent work,and perhaps,if you are lucky,a pointer toa recent survey paper.If you canﬁnd such a survey,youare done.Read the survey,congratulating yourself on your good luck.Otherwise,in the second step,ﬁnd shared citations and repeated author names in the bibliography.These are thekey papers and researchers in that area.Download the key papers and set them aside.Then go to the websites of thekey researchers and see where they’ve published recently. That will help you identify the top conferences in thatﬁeld because the best researchers usually publish in the top con-ferences.The third step is to go to the website for these top con-ferences and look through their recent proceedings.A quick scan will usually identify recent high-quality related work. These papers,along with the ones you set aside earlier,con-stitute theﬁrst version of your survey.Make two passes through these papers.If they all cite a key paper that youdid notﬁnd earlier,obtain and read it,iterating as neces-sary.4.RELATED WORKIf you are reading a paper to do a review,you should also read Timothy Roscoe’s paper on“Writing reviews for sys-tems conferences”[3].If you’re planning to write a technical paper,you should refer both to Henning Schulzrinne’s com-prehensive web site[4]and George Whitesides’s excellent overview of the process[5].Finally,Simon Peyton Joneshas a website that covers the entire spectrum of research skills[2].Iain H.McLean of Psychology,Inc.has put together a downloadable‘review matrix’that simpliﬁes paper review-ing using the three-pass approach for papers in experimen-tal psychology[1],which can probably be used,with minor modiﬁcations,for papers in other areas.5.ACKNOWLEDGMENTSTheﬁrst version of this document was drafted by my stu-dents:Hossein Falaki,Earl Oliver,and Sumair Ur Rahman.My thanks to them.I also beneﬁted from Christophe Diot’s perceptive comments and Nicole Keshav’s eagle-eyed copy-editing.I would like to make this a living document,updating itas I receive comments.Please take a moment to email meany comments or suggestions for improvement.Thanks to encouraging feedback from many correspondents over the years.6.REFERENCES[1]I.H.McLean,“Literature Review Matrix,”/[2]S.Peyton Jones,“Research Skills,”/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers/giving-a-talk/giving-a-talk.htm[3]T.Roscoe,“Writing Reviews for Systems Conferences,”http://people.inf.ethz.ch/troscoe/pubs/review-writing.pdf[4]H.Schulzrinne,“Writing Technical Articles,”/∼hgs/etc/writing-style.html[5]G.M.Whitesides,“Whitesides’Group:Writing a Paper,”/∼rlake/Whitesides writing res paper.pdf。

如何阅读论文 How to read a paper

如何阅读论文∗作者：S.KeShav†，译者：计军平‡摘要学者们需花费大量时间阅读论文。

然而，很少有人传授这项技能，导致初学者浪费了大量时间精力。

本文提出了一种高效实用的论文阅读方法——“三轮阅读法”。

同时，本文也描述了如何采用该方法进行文献综述。

1概述学者们出于各种原因阅读论文，比如为了准备一场学术会议或者一堂课，为了紧跟自己所在领域的研究进展，或者为了了解新领域而进行的文献综述。

一般而言，一名学者每年会花数百小时来阅读论文。

高效阅读论文是一项极其重要但却很少被人传授的技能。

因此，初学者不得不在自己的摸索中学习这项技能。

结果是他们在此过程中浪费了很多精力，并且常常陷入深深的挫败感之中。

多年以来，我一直使用一种简单有效的方法来阅读论文。

本文对这种“三轮阅读法”进行了说明，并介绍了该方法在文献综述中的应用。

2三轮阅读法该方法的关键点在于分三轮阅读一篇论文，而非仔细地从头看到尾。

每一轮阅读都在上一轮的基础上达成特定的目的：第一轮了解论文的大意，第二轮了解论文的主要内容（而非细节），第三轮深入理解论文。

∗S.Keshav,2007.How to Read a Paper.ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 37(3):83-84.†David R.Cherition School of Computer Science,University of Waterloo‡北京大学深圳研究生院环境与能源学院12三轮阅读法2 2.1第一轮阅读第一轮属于鸟瞰式阅读，快速浏览论文。

由此决定是否需要进入后两轮阅读。

这一轮使用5至10分钟，包括以下四个步骤：1.仔细阅读题目、摘要及导言；2.阅读章节标题，略过其他内容；3.阅读结论；4.粗略地看一下参考文献，识别出你已经读过的文献。

在第一轮的最后，你应该能回答以下五个问题：1.类别：这篇论文属于什么类别？是实证量化分析？还是对现有方法进行改进？亦或是提出了一个新的理论？2.背景：这篇论文与哪些论文有关联？分析的理论基础有哪些？3.正确性：凭经验判断，这篇论文的前提假设是否成立？4.贡献：这篇论文的主要贡献是什么？5.清晰度：这篇论文的文字表述是否清晰？基于上述信息，你可能决定不再阅读这篇文章。

怎么阅读英语论文(英汉)

Base on the paper: How to read a paper---- S. KeshavResearchers must read papers for several reasons: to re-view them for a conference or a class, to keep current in their field, or for a literature survey of a new field. A typical researcher will likely spend hundreds of hours every year reading papers.1. The First PassInstead of starting at the beginning and plowing your way to the end. Each pass accomplishes specic goals and builds upon the previous pass:1)The first pass gives you a general idea about the paper.2)The second pass lets you grasp the paper's content, but not its details.3)The third pass helps you understand the paper in depth.So,when get a paper,firstly,this first pass should take about five to ten minutes and consists of the following steps:1. Carefully read the title, abstract, and introduction.2. Read the section and sub-section headings, but ignoreeverything else3. Glance at the mathematical content (if any) to determine the underlying theoretical foundations.4. Read the conclusions5. Glance over the references, mentally ticking of the ones you've alreadyread.At the end of the first pass, you should be able to answerthe five Cs:1. Category: What type of paper is this? A measurement paper? An analysis of an existing system? A description of a research prototype?（学术论文？会议论文？综述论文？介绍某种新算法论文？…）2. Context: Which other papers is it related to? Which theoretical bases were used to analyze the problem?（论文要解决的问题是什么；基本的数学理论或者模型是什么）3. Correctness: Do the assumptions appear to be valid?4. Contributions: What are the paper's main contributions?5. Clarity: Is the paper well written?(判断的标准是研究的领域时候前沿，是否有人做过类似工作；文中的方法是否很详细；文中的思路是否很清晰等..)2. The Scond PassIn the second pass, read the paper with greater care, but ignore details such as proofs. It helps to jot down the key points, or to make comments in the margins, as you read. “ note down terms you didn't understand, or questions you may want to ask the author."Else,Look carefully at the figures, diagrams and other illustrations in the paper. Pay special attention to graphs. (Are the axes properly labeled?Are results shown with error bars, so that conclusions are statistically significant? )The second pass should take up to an hour for an experienced reader. After this pass, you should be able to grasp the content of the paper. You should be able to summarize the main thrust of the paper, with supporting evidence, to someone else.In addition, Remember to mark relevant unread references for further reading (this is a good way to learn more about the background of the paper，and this program easily be ignored).Sometimes you won't understand a paper even at the end of the second pass. This may be because the subject matter is new to you, with unfamiliar terminology and acronyms. Or it could just be that it's late at night and you're tired. You can now choose to: (a) set the paper aside, hoping you don't need to understand the material to be successful in your career, (b) return to the paper later, perhaps after reading background material or (c) persevere and go on to the third pass.3. The Third PassThe key to the third pass is to attempt to virtually re-implement the paper: that is,making the same assumptions as the authors, re-create the work. By comparing this re-creation with the actual paper,you can easily identify not only a paper's innovations, but also its hidden failings andassumptions.This pass requires great attention to detail. You should identify and challenge every assumption in every statement. Moreover, you should think about how you yourself would present a particular idea. （如果是自己会怎么设计方法？）.This comparison of the actual with the virtual lends a sharp insight into the proof and presentation techniques in the paper and you can very likely add this to your repertoire of tools. During this pass, you should also jot down ideas for future work.This pass can take many hours for beginners and morethan an hour or two even for an experienced reader. At theend of this pass, you should be able to reconstruct the entirestructure of the paper from memory, as well as be able toidentify its strong and weak points. In particular, you shouldbe able to pinpoint implicit assumptions, missing citationsto relevant work, and potential issues with experimental oranalytical techniques.(That’s mean you should find out what work the author have done and what can be improved.)基本的疑问总结：1、论文主要解决的问题是什么？2、这个问题重要吗？为什么？我为什么要读这篇文献？是否有人做过？3、A 通过图表，你会得到什么结论？B 图表说明什么问题？能否说明该问题自己要得到这张图会用什么方法？作者用的是什么方法？C 你能够重新画出这张图，用自己的语言表达吗？4、作者采用什么方法来解决这个问题？假设是什么？理论依据是什么？这些方法是否符合论证命题的需要？通过这个方法，你觉得大概能得到怎样的结果？是否有能得到更好结果的方法或更加简单的方法？他为什么这样设计试验？是怎么想到的？有什么创新？你为什么没有想到？5、A 这些设计能否满足需要？为什么？这种方法有什么缺陷或进一步需要阐明的地方? 结果分析统计方法有什么缺陷B 这些试验是如何组织起来的，之间的逻辑关系是什么？每项试验都有什么意义？哪些是必要的？哪些是不必要的？C 如果是我得到这样的结果，我会得到什么结论？6、A 文章的结论是什么？和你想的差异在哪里？B 结论可靠性如何？对原来的结论有什么支持或变化？你如何评价？C 讨论中是如何从已知的知识得到结论的6、自己会怎么设计方法来解决？7、A 试验结果是否支持文章的结论问题、设计、方法和讨论的逻辑关系是什么，作者是如何达到目的的？有哪些哲学思想和技巧？B 还有哪些不确定采用的是推测的地方？为什么不确定？我能否进一步确定？C 文章是如何描述结果、如何解析图表趋势，论据如何组合，如何表达自己的观点？8、和同类文献，有什么共同点和不同点？9、和以前的文献，作者思路上有什么变化，下一步是什么？我能否有进一步改进或者加入？10、别人还有哪些地方没做？要是我接着此方向继续做，哪些是在我所在工作条件下可以做的，哪些必须要做，哪些别人肯定比我做得更好更快？。

如何阅读文档 paper-reading

How to Read a PaperAugust2,2013S.KeshavDavid R.Cheriton School of Computer Science,University of WaterlooWaterloo,ON,Canadakeshav@uwaterloo.caABSTRACTResearchers spend a great deal of time reading research pa-pers.However,this skill is rarely taught,leading to much wasted eﬀort.This article outlines a practical and eﬃcient three-pass method for reading research papers.I also de-scribe how to use this method to do a literature survey. 1.INTRODUCTIONResearchers must read papers for several reasons:to re-view them for a conference or a class,to keep current in theirﬁeld,or for a literature survey of a newﬁeld.A typi-cal researcher will likely spend hundreds of hours every year reading papers.Learning to eﬃciently read a paper is a critical but rarely taught skill.Beginning graduate students,therefore,must learn on their own using trial and error.Students waste much eﬀort in the process and are frequently driven to frus-tration.For many years I have used a simple‘three-pass’approach to prevent me from drowning in the details of a paper be-fore getting a bird’s-eye-view.It allows me to estimate the amount of time required to review a set of papers.Moreover, I can adjust the depth of paper evaluation depending on my needs and how much time I have.This paper describes the approach and its use in doing a literature survey.2.THE THREE-PASS APPROACHThe key idea is that you should read the paper in up to three passes,instead of starting at the beginning and plow-ing your way to the end.Each pass accomplishes speciﬁc goals and builds upon the previous pass:The first pass gives you a general idea about the paper.The second pass lets you grasp the paper’s content,but not its details.The third pass helps you understand the paper in depth.2.1Theﬁrst passTheﬁrst pass is a quick scan to get a bird’s-eye view of the paper.You can also decide whether you need to do any more passes.This pass should take aboutﬁve to ten minutes and consists of the following steps:1.Carefully read the title,abstract,and introduction2.Read the section and sub-section headings,but ignoreeverything else3.Glance at the mathematical content(if any)to deter-mine the underlying theoretical foundations4.Read the conclusions5.Glance over the references,mentally ticking oﬀtheones you’ve already readAt the end of theﬁrst pass,you should be able to answer theﬁve Cs:1.Category:What type of paper is this?A measure-ment paper?An analysis of an existing system?A description of a research prototype?2.Context:Which other papers is it related to?Whichtheoretical bases were used to analyze the problem?3.Correctness:Do the assumptions appear to be valid?4.Contributions:What are the paper’s main contribu-tions?5.Clarity:Is the paper well written?Using this information,you may choose not to read fur-ther(and not print it out,thus saving trees).This could be because the paper doesn’t interest you,or you don’t know enough about the area to understand the paper,or that the authors make invalid assumptions.Theﬁrst pass is ade-quate for papers that aren’t in your research area,but may someday prove relevant.Incidentally,when you write a paper,you can expect most reviewers(and readers)to make only one pass over it.Take care to choose coherent section and sub-section titles and to write concise and comprehensive abstracts.If a reviewer cannot understand the gist after one pass,the paper will likely be rejected;if a reader cannot understand the high-lights of the paper afterﬁve minutes,the paper will likely never be read.For these reasons,a‘graphical abstract’that summarizes a paper with a single well-chosenﬁgure is an ex-cellent idea and can be increasingly found in scientiﬁc jour-nals.2.2The second passIn the second pass,read the paper with greater care,but ignore details such as proofs.It helps to jot down the key points,or to make comments in the margins,as you read. Dominik Grusemann from Uni Augsburg suggests that you “note down terms you didn’t understand,or questions you may want to ask the author.”If you are acting as a paper referee,these comments will help you when you are writing your review,and to back up your review during the program committee meeting.1.Look carefully at theﬁgures,diagrams and other illus-trations in the paper.Pay special attention to graphs.Are the axes properly labeled?Are results shown witherror bars,so that conclusions are statistically sig-niﬁcant?Common mistakes like these will separaterushed,shoddy work from the truly excellent.2.Remember to mark relevant unread references for fur-ther reading(this is a good way to learn more aboutthe background of the paper).The second pass should take up to an hour for an expe-rienced reader.After this pass,you should be able to grasp the content of the paper.You should be able to summarize the main thrust of the paper,with supporting evidence,to someone else.This level of detail is appropriate for a paper in which you are interested,but does not lie in your research speciality.Sometimes you won’t understand a paper even at the end of the second pass.This may be because the subject matter is new to you,with unfamiliar terminology and acronyms. Or the authors may use a proof or experimental technique that you don’t understand,so that the bulk of the pa-per is incomprehensible.The paper may be poorly written with unsubstantiated assertions and numerous forward ref-erences.Or it could just be that it’s late at night and you’re tired.You can now choose to:(a)set the paper aside,hoping you don’t need to understand the material to be successful in your career,(b)return to the paper later,perhaps after reading background material or(c)persevere and go on to the third pass.2.3The third passTo fully understand a paper,particularly if you are re-viewer,requires a third pass.The key to the third pass is to attempt to virtually re-implement the paper:that is, making the same assumptions as the authors,re-create the work.By comparing this re-creation with the actual paper, you can easily identify not only a paper’s innovations,but also its hidden failings and assumptions.This pass requires great attention to detail.You should identify and challenge every assumption in every statement. Moreover,you should think about how you yourself would present a particular idea.This comparison of the actual with the virtual lends a sharp insight into the proof and presentation techniques in the paper and you can very likely add this to your repertoire of tools.During this pass,you should also jot down ideas for future work.This pass can take many hours for beginners and more than an hour or two even for an experienced reader.At the end of this pass,you should be able to reconstruct the entire structure of the paper from memory,as well as be able to identify its strong and weak points.In particular,you should be able to pinpoint implicit assumptions,missing citations to relevant work,and potential issues with experimental or analytical techniques.3.DOING A LITERATURE SURVEYPaper reading skills are put to the test in doing a literature survey.This will require you to read tens of papers,perhaps in an unfamiliarﬁeld.What papers should you read?Here is how you can use the three-pass approach to help.First,use an academic search engine such as Google Scholar or CiteSeer and some well-chosen keywords toﬁnd three to ﬁve recent highly-cited papers in the area.Do one pass on each paper to get a sense of the work,then read their re-lated work sections.You willﬁnd a thumbnail summary ofthe recent work,and perhaps,if you are lucky,a pointer toa recent survey paper.If you canﬁnd such a survey,youare done.Read the survey,congratulating yourself on your good luck.Otherwise,in the second step,ﬁnd shared citations and repeated author names in the bibliography.These are thekey papers and researchers in that area.Download the key papers and set them aside.Then go to the websites of thekey researchers and see where they’ve published recently. That will help you identify the top conferences in thatﬁeld because the best researchers usually publish in the top con-ferences.The third step is to go to the website for these top con-ferences and look through their recent proceedings.A quick scan will usually identify recent high-quality related work. These papers,along with the ones you set aside earlier,con-stitute theﬁrst version of your survey.Make two passes through these papers.If they all cite a key paper that youdid notﬁnd earlier,obtain and read it,iterating as neces-sary.4.RELATED WORKIf you are reading a paper to do a review,you should also read Timothy Roscoe’s paper on“Writing reviews for sys-tems conferences”[3].If you’re planning to write a technical paper,you should refer both to Henning Schulzrinne’s com-prehensive web site[4]and George Whitesides’s excellent overview of the process[5].Finally,Simon Peyton Joneshas a website that covers the entire spectrum of research skills[2].Iain H.McLean of Psychology,Inc.has put together a downloadable‘review matrix’that simpliﬁes paper review-ing using the three-pass approach for papers in experimen-tal psychology[1],which can probably be used,with minor modiﬁcations,for papers in other areas.5.ACKNOWLEDGMENTSTheﬁrst version of this document was drafted by my stu-dents:Hossein Falaki,Earl Oliver,and Sumair Ur Rahman.My thanks to them.I also beneﬁted from Christophe Diot’s perceptive comments and Nicole Keshav’s eagle-eyed copy-editing.I would like to make this a living document,updating itas I receive comments.Please take a moment to email meany comments or suggestions for improvement.Thanks to encouraging feedback from many correspondents over the years.6.REFERENCES[1]I.H.McLean,“Literature Review Matrix,”/[2]S.Peyton Jones,“Research Skills,”/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers/giving-a-talk/giving-a-talk.htm[3]T.Roscoe,“Writing Reviews for Systems Conferences,”http://people.inf.ethz.ch/troscoe/pubs/review-writing.pdf[4]H.Schulzrinne,“Writing Technical Articles,”/∼hgs/etc/writing-style.html[5]G.M.Whitesides,“Whitesides’Group:Writing a Paper,”/∼rlake/Whitesides writing res paper.pdf。

How-to-Read-a-Scientific-Paper-(如何阅读科学性论文)

How to Read a Scientific PaperThe main purpose of a scientific paper is to report new results, usually experimental, and to relate these results to previous knowledge in the field. Papers are one of the most important ways that we communicate with one another.In understanding how to read a paper, we need to start at the beginning with a few preliminaries. We then address the main questions that will enable you to understand and evaluate the paper.1. How are papers organized?2. How do I prepare to read a paper, particularly in an area not so familiar to me?3. What difficulties can I expect?4. How do I understand and evaluate the contents of the paper?1. Organization of a paperIn most scientific journals, scientific papers follow a standard format. They are divided into several sections, and each section serves a specific purpose in the paper. We first describe the standard format, then some variations on that format.A paper begins with a short Summary or Abstract. Generally, it gives a brief background to the topic; describes concisely the major findings of the paper; and relates these findings to the field of study. As will be seen, this logical order is also that of the paper as a whole.The next section of the paper is the Introduction. In many journals this section is not given a title. As its name implies, this section presents the background knowledge necessary for the reader to understand why the findings of the paper are an advance on the knowledge in the field. Typically, the Introduction describes first the accepted state of knowledge in a specialized field; then it focuses more specifically on a particular aspect, usually describing a finding or set of findings that led directly to the work described in the paper. If the authors are testing a hypothesis, the source of that hypothesis is spelled out, findings are given with which it is consistent, and one or more predictions are given. In many papers, one or several major conclusions of the paper are presented at the end of this section, so that the reader knows the major answersto the questions just posed. Papers more descriptive or comparative in nature may begin with an introduction to an area which interests the authors, or the need for a broader database.The next section of most papers is the Materials and Methods. In some journals this section is the last one. Its purpose is to describe the materials used in the experiments and the methods by which the experiments were carried out. In principle, this description should be detailed enough to allow other researchers to replicate the work. In practice, these descriptions are often highly compressed, and they often refer back to previous papers by the authors.The third section is usually Results. This section describes the experiments and the reasons they were done. Generally, the logic of the Results section follows directly from that of the Introduction. That is, the Introduction poses the questions addressed in the early part of Results. Beyond this point, the organization of Results differs from one paper to another. In some papers, the results are presented without extensive discussion, which is reserved for the following section. This is appropriate when the data in the early parts do not need to be interpreted extensively to understand why the later experiments were done. In other papers, results are given, and then they are interpreted, perhaps taken together with other findings not in the paper, so as to give the logical basis for later experiments.The fourth section is the Discussion. This section serves several purposes. First, the data in the paper are interpreted; that is, they are analyzed to show what the authors believe the data show. Any limitations to the interpretations should be acknowledged, and fact should clearly be separated from speculation. Second, the findings of the paper are related to other findings in the field. This serves to show how the findings contribute to knowledge, or correct the errors of previous work. As stated, some of these logical arguments are often found in the Results when it is necessary to clarify why later experiments were carried out. Although you might argue that in this case the discussion material should be presented in the Introduction, more often you cannot grasp its significance until the first part of Results is given.Finally, papers usually have a short Acknowledgements section, in which various contributions of other workers are recognized, followed by a Reference list giving references to papers and other works cited in the text.Papers also contain several Figures and Tables. These contain data described in the paper. The figures and tables also have legends, whose purpose is to give details of the particular experiment or experiments shown there. Typically, if a procedure is used only once in a paper, these details are described in Materials and Methods, and the Figure or Table legend refers back to that description. If a procedure is used repeatedly,however, a general description is given in Materials and Methods, and the details for a particular experiment are given in the Table or Figure legend.Variations on the organization of a paperIn most scientific journals, the above format is followed. Occasionally, the Results and Discussion are combined, in cases in which the data need extensive discussion to allow the reader to follow the train of logic developed in the course of the research. As stated, in some journals, Materials and Methods follows the Discussion. In certain older papers, the Summary was given at the end of the paper.The formats for two widely-read journals, Science and Nature, differ markedly from the above outline. These journals reach a wide audience, and many authors wish to publish in them; accordingly, the space limitations on the papers are severe, and the prose is usually highly compressed. In both journals, there are no discrete sections, except for a short abstract and a reference list. In Science, the abstract isself-contained; in Nature, the abstract also serves as a brief introduction to the paper. Experimental details are usually given either in endnotes (for Science) or Figure and Table legends and a short Methods section (in Nature). Authors often try to circumvent length limitations by putting as much material as possible in these places. In addition, an increasingly common practice is to put a substantial fraction of the less-important material, and much of the methodology, into Supplemental Data that can be accessed online.Many other journals also have length limitations, which similarly lead to a need for conciseness. For example, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences(PNAS) has a six-page limit;Cell severely edits many papers to shorten them, and has a short word limit in the abstract; and so on.In response to the pressure to edit and make the paper concise, many authors choose to condense or, more typically, omit the logical connections that would make the flow of the paper easy. In addition, much of the background that would make the paper accessible to a wider audience is condensed or omitted, so that the less-informed reader has to consult a review article or previous papers to make sense of what the issues are and why they are important. Finally, again, authors often circumvent page limitations by putting crucial details into the Figure and Table legends, especially when (as inPNAS) these are set in smaller type. Fortunately, the recent widespread practice of putting less-critical material into online supplemental material has lessened the pressure to compress content so drastically, but it is still a problem for older papers.Back to outline2. Reading a scientific paperAlthough it is tempting to read the paper straight through as you would do with most text, it is more efficient to organize the way you read. Generally, you first read the Abstract in order to understand the major points of the work. The extent of background assumed by different authors, and allowed by the journal, also varies as just discussed.One extremely useful habit in reading a paper is to read the Title and the Abstract and, before going on, review in your mind what you know about the topic. This serves several purposes. First, it clarifies whether you in fact know enough background to appreciate the paper. If not, you might choose to read the background in a review or textbook, as appropriate.Second, it refreshes your memory about the topic. Third, and perhaps most importantly, it helps you as the reader integrate the new information into your previous knowledge about the topic. That is, it is used as a part of the self-education process that any professional must continue throughout his/her career.If you are very familiar with the field, the Introduction can be skimmed or even skipped. As stated above, the logical flow of most papers goes straight from the Introduction to Results; accordingly, the paper should be read in that way as well, skipping Materials and Methods and referring back to this section as needed to clarify what was actually done. A reader familiar with the field who is interested in a particular point given in the Abstract often skips directly to the relevant section of the Results, and from there to the Discussion for interpretation of the findings. This is only easy to do if the paper is organized properly.CodewordsMany papers contain shorthand phrases that we might term 'codewords', since they have connotations that are generally not explicit. In many papers, not all the experimental data are shown, but referred to by "(data not shown)". This is often for reasons of space; the practice is accepted when the authors have documented their competence to do the experiments properly (usually in previous papers). Two other codewords are"unpublished data" and "preliminary data". The former can either mean that the data are not of publishable quality or that the work is part of a larger story that will one day be published. The latter means different things to different people, but one connotation is that the experiment was done only once.Back to outline3. Difficulties in reading a paperSeveral difficulties confront the reader, particularly one who is not familiar with the field. As discussed above, it may be necessary to bring yourself up to speed before beginning a paper, no matter how well written it is. Be aware, however, that although some problems may lie in the reader, many are the fault of the writer.One major problem is that many papers are poorly written. Some scientists are poor writers. Many others do not enjoy writing, and do not take the time or effort to ensure that the prose is clear and logical. Also, the author is typically so familiar with the material that it is difficult to step back and see it from the point of view of a reader not familiar with the topic and for whom the paper is just another of a large stack of papers that need to be read.Bad writing has several consequences for the reader. First, the logical connections are often left out. Instead of saying why an experiment was done, or what ideas were being tested, the experiment is simply described. Second, papers are often cluttered with a great deal of jargon. Third, the authors often do not provide a clear road-map through the paper; side issues and fine points are given equal air time with the main logical thread, and the reader loses this thread. In better writing, these side issues are relegated to Figure legends, Materials and Methods, or online Supplemental Material, or else clearly identified as side issues, so as not to distract the reader.Another major difficulty arises when the reader seeks to understand just what the experiment was. All too often, authors refer back to previous papers; these refer in turn to previous papers in a long chain. Often that chain ends in a paper that describes several methods, and it is unclear which was used. Or the chain ends in a journal with severe space limitations, and the description is so compressed as to be unclear. More often, the descriptions are simply not well-written, so that it is ambiguous what was done.Other difficulties arise when the authors are uncritical about their experiments; if they firmly believe a particular model, they may not be open-minded about other possibilities. These may not be tested experimentally, and may even go unmentioned in the Discussion. Still another, related problem is that many authors do not clearly distinguish between fact and speculation, especially in the Discussion. This makes it difficult for the reader to know how well-established are the "facts" under discussion.One final problem arises from the sociology of science. Many authors are ambitious and wish to publish in trendy journals. As a consequence, they overstate the importance of their findings, or put a speculation into the title in a way that makes it sound like a well-established finding. Another example of this approach is the "Assertive Sentence Title", which presents a major conclusion of the paper as a declarative sentence (such as "LexA is a repressor of the recA and lexA genes"). This trend is becoming prevalent; look at recent issues of Cell for examples. It's not so bad when the assertive sentence is well-documented (as it was in the example given), but all too often the assertive sentence is nothing more than a speculation, and the hasty reader may well conclude that the issue is settled when it isn't.These last factors represent the public relations side of a competitive field. This behavior is understandable, if not praiseworthy. But when the authors mislead the reader as to what is firmly established and what is speculation, it is hard, especially for the novice, to know what is settled and what is not. A careful evaluation is necessary, as we now discuss.Back to outline4. Evaluating a paperA thorough understanding and evaluation of a paper involves answering several questions:a. What questions does the paper address?b. What are the main conclusions of the paper?c. What evidence supports those conclusions?d. Do the data actually support the conclusions?e. What is the quality of the evidence?f. Why are the conclusions important?a. What questions does the paper address?Before addressing this question, we need to be aware that research in biochemistry and molecular biology can be of several different types:Type of research Question asked:Descriptive What is there? What do we see?Comparative How does it compare to other organisms? Are our findingsgeneral?Analytical How does it work? What is themechanism?Descriptive research often takes place in the early stages of our understanding of a system. We can't formulate hypotheses about how a system works, or what its interconnections are, until we know what is there. Typical descriptive approaches in molecular biology are DNA sequencing and DNA microarray approaches. In biochemistry, one could regard x-ray crystallography as a descriptive endeavor.Comparative research often takes place when we are asking how general a finding is. Is it specific to my particular organism, or is it broadly applicable? A typical comparative approach would be comparing the sequence of a gene from one organism with that from the other organisms in which that gene is found. One example of this is the observation that the actin genes from humans and budding yeast are 89% identical and 96% similar.Analytical research generally takes place when we know enough to begin formulating hypotheses about how a system works, about how the parts are interconnected, and what the causal connections are. A typical analytical approach would be to devise two (or more) alternative hypotheses about how a system operates. These hypotheses would all be consistent with current knowledge about the system. Ideally, the approach would devisea set of experiments todistinguish among these hypotheses. A classic example is the Meselson-Stahl experiment.Of course, many papers are a combination of these approaches. For instance, researchers might sequence a gene from their model organism; compare its sequence to homologous genes from other organisms; use this comparison to devise a hypothesis for the function of the gene product; and test this hypothesis by making a site-directed change in the gene and asking how that affects the phenotype of the organism and/or the biochemical function of the gene product.Being aware that not all papers have the same approach can orient you towards recognizing the major questions that a paper addresses.What are these questions? In a well-written paper, as described above, the Introduction generally goes from the general to the specific, eventually framing a question or set of questions. This is a good starting place. In addition, the results of experiments usually raise additional questions, which the authors may attempt to answer. These questions usually become evident only in the Results section.Back to Evaluating a paperb. What are the main conclusions of the paper?This question can often be answered in a preliminary way by studying the abstract of the paper. Here the authors highlight what they think are the key points. This is not enough, because abstracts often have severe space constraints, but it can serve as a starting point. Still, you need to read the paper with this question in mind.Back to Evaluating a paperc. What evidence supports those conclusions?Generally, you can get a pretty good idea about this from the Results section. The description of the findings points to the relevant tables and figures. This is easiest when there is one primary experiment to support a point. However, it is often the case that several different experiments or approaches combine to support a particular conclusion. For example, the first experiment might have several possible interpretations, and the later ones are designed to distinguish among these.In the ideal case, the Discussion begins with a section of the form "Three lines of evidence provide support for the conclusion that...First, ...Second,... etc." However, difficulties can arise when the paper is poorly written (see above). The authors often do not present a concise summary of this type, leaving you to make it yourself. A skeptic might argue that in such cases the logical structure of the argument is weak and is omitted on purpose! In any case, you need to be sure that you understand the relationship between the data and the conclusions.Back to Evaluating a paperd. Do the data actually support the conclusions?One major advantage of doing this is that it helps you to evaluate whether the conclusion is sound. If we assume for the moment that the data are believable (see next section), it still might be the case that the data do not actually support the conclusion the authors wish to reach. There are at least two different ways this can happen:i. The logical connection between the data and the interpretation is not soundii. There might be other interpretations that might be consistent with the data.One important aspect to look for is whether the authors take multiple approaches to answering a question. Do they have multiple lines of evidence, from different directions, supporting their conclusions? If there is only one line of evidence, it is more likely that it could be interpreted in a different way; multiple approaches make the argument more persuasive.Another thing to look for is implicit or hidden assumptions used by the authors in interpreting their data. This can be hard to do, unless you understand the field thoroughly.Back to Evaluating a papere. What is the quality of that evidence?This is the hardest question to answer, for novices and experts alike. At the same time, it is one of the most important skills to learn as a young scientist. It involves a major reorientation from being a relatively passive consumer of information and ideas to an active producer and critical evaluator of them. This is not easy and takes years to master.Beginning scientists often wonder, "Who am I to question these authorities? After all the paper was published in a top journal, so the authors must have a high standing, and the work must have received a critical review by experts." Unfortunately, that's not always the case. In any case, developing your ability to evaluate evidence is one of the hardest and most important aspects of learning to be a critical scientist and reader.How can you evaluate the evidence?First, you need to understand thoroughly the methods used in the experiments. Often these are described poorly or not at all (see above). The details are often missing, but more importantly the authors usually assume that the reader has a general knowledge of common methods in the field (such as immunoblotting, cloning, genetic methods, or DNase I footprinting). If you lack this knowledge, as discussed above you have to make the extra effort to inform yourself about the basic methodology before you can evaluate the data.Sometimes you have to trace back the details of the methods if they are important. The increasing availability of journals on the Web has made this easier by obviating the need to find a hard-copy issue, e.g.in the library. A comprehensive listing of journals relevant to this course, developed by the Science Library, allows access to most of the listed volumes from any computer at the University; a second list at the Arizona Health Sciences Library includes some other journals, again from University computers.Second, you need to know the limitations of the methodology. Every method has limitations, and if the experiments are not done correctly they can't be interpreted.For instance, an immunoblot is not a very quantitative method. Moreover, in a certain range of protein the signal increases (that is, the signal is at least roughly "linear"), but above a certain amount of protein the signal no longer increases. Therefore, to use this method correctly one needs a standard curve that shows that the experimental lanes are in a linear range. Often, the authors will not show this standard curve, but they should state that such curves were done. If you don't see such an assertion, it could of course result from bad writing, but it might also not have been done. If it wasn't done, a dark band might mean "there is this much protein or an indefinite amount more".Third, importantly, you need to distinguish between what the data show and what the authors say they show. The latter is really an interpretation on the authors' part, though it is generally not stated to be an interpretation. Papers usually state something like "the data in Fig. x show that ...". This is the authors' interpretation of the data. Do you interpret it the same way? You need to look carefully at the data to ensure that they really do show what the authors say they do. You can only do this effectively if you understand the methods and their limitations.Fourth, it is often helpful to look at the original journal, or its electronic counterpart, instead of a photocopy. Particularly forhalf-tone figures such as photos of gels or autoradiograms, the contrast is distorted, usually increased, by photocopying, so that the data are misrepresented.Fifth, you should ask if the proper controls are present. Controls tell us that nature is behaving the way we expect it to under the conditions of the experiment (see here for more details). If the controls are missing, it is harder to be confident that the results really show what is happening in the experiment. You should try to develop the habit of asking "where are the controls?" and looking for them.Back to Evaluating a paperf. Why are the conclusions important?Do the conclusions make a significant advance in our knowledge? Do they lead to new insights, or even new research directions?Again, answering these questions requires that you understand the field relatively well.（注：可编辑下载，若有不当之处，请指正，谢谢!）。

阅读外文文献的方法

1. 每次读完文献(不管是细读还是粗读), 合上文献后,想想看,文章最重要的take home message是什么, 如果不知道,就从abstract, conclusion里找, 并且从discuss里最好确认一下. 这样一来, 一篇文章就过关了. take home message其实都不会很多, 基本上是一些concepts, 如果你发现你需要记得很多,那往往是没有读到重点.2. 扩充知识面的读法, 重点读introduction, 看人家提出的问题, 以及目前的进展类似的文章, 每天读一两篇,一个月内就基本上对这个领域的某个方向有个大概的了解.读好的review也行, 但这样人容易懒惰.3. 为了写文章的读法, 读文章的时候, 尤其是看discussion的时候, 看到好的英文句型, 最好有意识的记一下,看一下作者是谁,哪篇文章,哪个期刊, 这样以后照猫画虎写的时候,效率高些.比自己在那里半天琢磨出一个句子强的多. 当然,读的多,写的多,你需要记得句型就越少.其实很简单,有意识的去总结和记亿, 就不容易忘记.2.科研牛人二告诉研究生怎么看文献，怎么写论文一、先看综述先读综述,可以更好地认识课题,知道已经做出什么，自己要做什么,,还有什么问题没有解决。

对于国内文献一般批评的声音很多.但它是你迅速了解你的研究领域的入口,在此之后,你再看外文文献会比一开始直接看外文文献理解的快得多。

而国外的综述多为本学科的资深人士撰写，涉及范围广，可以让人事半功倍。

二、有针对地选择文献针对你自己的方向,找相近的论文来读,从中理解文章中回答什么问题,通过哪些技术手段来证明,有哪些结论?从这些文章中,了解研究思路,逻辑推论,学习技术方法.1.关键词、主题词检索：关键词、主题词一定要选好，这样，才能保证你所要的内容的全面。

因为，换个主题词，可以有新的内容出现。

2. 检索某个学者：查SCI,知道了某个在这个领域有建树的学者，找他近期发表的文章。

怎样阅读英文文献,How to read english papers

How to Read a Scientific Research Paper--a four-step guide for students and for facultyAnn McNeal, School of Natural Science, Hampshire College, Amherst MA01002Reading research papers ("primary articles") is partly a matter of experience and skill, and partly learning the specific vocabulary of a field. First of all, DON'T PANIC! If you approach it step by step, even an impossible-looking paper can be understood.1. Skimming. Skim the paper quickly, noting basics like headings, figures and the like. This takes just a few minutes. You're not trying to understand it yet, but just to get an overview.2. Vocabulary. Go through the paper word by word and line by line, underlining or highlighting every word and phrase you don't understand. Don't worry if there are a lot of underlinings; you're still not trying to make sense of the article.Now you have several things you might do with these vocabulary and concept questions, depending upon the kind of question each is. You cana.Look up simple words and phrases. Often the question is simplyvocabulary--what's a lateral malleolus, or a christa, or thesemilunar valve. A medical or biological dictionary is a good place to look for definitions. A textbook of physiology or anatomy may be a good source, because it give more complete explanations. Your ordinary shelf dictionary is not a good source, because thedefinitions may not be precise enough or may not reflect the way in which scientists use a word (for example "efficiency" has acommon definition, but the physical definition is much morerestricted.)b.Get an understanding from the context in which it is used. Oftenwords that are used to describe the procedures used in an experiment can be understood from the context, and may be very specific to the paper you are reading. Examples are the "lithium-free controlgroup" in a rat experiment or the "carotene extraction procedure"in a biochemical experiment. Of course, you should be careful when deciding that you understand a word from its context, because it might not mean what you think.c.Flag this phrase as belonging to one of the major concepts of thepaper--it's bigger than a vocabulary question. For example, a paperabout diet and cancer might refer to "risk reduction," which you would need to understand in context and in some depth.3. Comprehension, section by section. Try to deal with all the words and phrases, although a few technical terms in the Methods section might remain. Now go back and read the whole paper, section by section, for comprehension.In the Introduction, note how the context is set. What larger question is this a part of? The author should summarize and comment on previous research, and you should distinguish between previous research and the actual current study. What is the hypothesis of the paper and the ways this will be tested?In the Methods, try to get a clear picture of what was done at each step. What was actually measured? It is a good idea to make an outline and/or sketch of the procedures and instruments. Keep notes of your questions; some of them may be simply technical, but others may point to more fundamental considerations that you will use for reflection and criticism below.In Results look carefully at the figures and tables, as they are the heart of most papers. A scientist will often read the figures and tables before deciding whether it is worthwhile to read the rest of the article! What does it mean to "understand" a figure? You understand a figure when you can redraw it and explain it in plain English words.The Discussion contains the conclusions that the author would like to draw from the data. In some papers, this section has a lot of interpretation and is very important. In any case, this is usually where the author reflects on the work and its meaning in relation to other findings and to the field in general.4. Reflection and criticism. After you understand the article and can summarize it, then you can return to broader questions and draw your own conclusions. It is very useful to keep track of your questions as you go along, returning to see whether they have been answered. Often, the simple questions may contain the seeds of very deep thoughts about the work--for example, "Why did the authors use a questionnaire at the end of the month to find out about premenstrual tension? Wouldn't subjects forget or have trouble recalling?"Here are some questions that may be useful in analyzing various kinds of research papers:Introduction:What is the overall purpose of the research?How does the research fit into the context of its field? Isit, for example, attempting to settle a controversy? show thevalidity of a new technique? open up a new field of inquiry?Do you agree with the author's rationale for studying thequestion in this way?Methods:Were the measurements appropriate for the questions theresearcher was approaching?Often, researchers need to use "indicators" because theycannot measure something directly--for example, usingbabies' birthweight to indicate nutritional status. Were themeasures in this research clearly related to the variablesin which the researchers (or you) were interested?If human subjects were studied, do they fairly represent thepopulations under study?ResultsWhat is the one major finding?Were enough of the data presented so that you feel you canjudge for yourself how the experiment turned out?Did you see patterns or trends in the data that the authordid not mention? Were there problems that were not addressed?DiscussionDo you agree with the conclusions drawn from the data?Are these conclusions over-generalized or appropriatelycareful?Are there other factors that could have influenced, oraccounted for, the results?What further experiments would you think of, to continue theresearch or to answer remaining questions?to top of pageTeacher's Guide to reading primary literatureAnn McNeal, School of Natural Science, Hampshire College, Amherst MA 01002 >amcneal@>There are many advantages to having undergraduates read primary literature (Epstein, 1972):∙Articles have a vividness that is seldom found in a text, so students get excited by them.∙Articles lend themselves to critical, analytical thinking.∙Students feel smart and powerful when they read original sources.∙Articles reveal the scientific process far better than secondary sources.It is important to choose articles that are appropriate for your students, looking at conceptual depth, vocabulary, and accessibility of the experimental and statistical techniques. Of these considerations, vocabulary is perhaps the least important, especially if you follow the suggestions below for introducing students to the new words. It is amazing what students can and do read, if they are given the tools to do so. Conceptual depth refers to the difficulty of the concepts important to the article. For example, an article on transcriptional factors in white blood cells requires students to understand some molecular biology. Such an article could be perfect for a cell biology course, but might be too advanced for basic biology. In addition to the difficulty of the main ideas addressed, the article may present some experimental and statistical techniques that are just too hard to grasp. For example, articles on research in epidemiology, such as the relationship of heart attacks to diet, are often wonderfully accessible--except when the authors use logistical analysis. Or an article on evolutionary relationships among protein molecules might be quite readable--except for the PCR techniques. In both these cases, you could decide to use the article anyway, if you have carefully figured out how to present the difficult techniques in a reasonably palatable way.In preparing your students to read articles for the first time, you will usually need to allocate a good amount of class time for the first article, but this experience should prepare them to be able to be a lot more independent in the future. This is the protocol we have found successful for first-time readers of research articles. (Woodhull-McNeal, 1989)A. Assignment 1.When you first assign the article, talk it up, saying how powerful students will feel when they can read the original literature and how exciting it is to read the papers scientists write for one another. Acknowledge that it will not be easy, but reassure students that you have a system that will make it all right. Briefly outline the four steps:1.Skimming,2.Vocabulary,prehension,4.Reflection and analysis.All students need to have copies of the paper so that they may mark it up freely. Send them away with the first assignment to do step 1 (skimming) and part of step 2 (vocabulary). What they should do is to underline or highlight every word and phrase they don't understand. The next class period will be devoted to giving them an understanding of the vocabulary.B. First class discussion--vocabulary. Plan to spend the entire class period defining terms they do not understand. It seems time-consuming, but in our experience it is completely worthwhile. Ask students to contribute words or phrases to be defined. Encourage everyone to name at least one term that needs defining--this helps to put them all on a more equal footing. (If students are asked to go and look up terms on this first paper, unless they are all at a high level, the exercise tends to split them further, with the more advanced students outstripping the others.) It is useful to write all terms on the board first, as the students name them, and to organize them by category (e.g., technique words from Methods, anatomical terms, chemicals). After most of the words have been listed, you may want to ask them about some others that they may have ignored. Then choose whatever order seems best to you (doing simple terms first often is helpful) and define, define, explain, explain. Remember, you aren't explaining the paper, just the vocabulary.C. Second assignment--comprehension. The next assignment is to read the paper for comprehension. At this point, you might want to assign students to answer some questions on the paper as well. The guidelines for students are as follows:In the Introduction, note the overall context--o what larger question is this a part of?o the author's summary and comments on previous research,o the hypothesis of the paper and the ways this will be tested.In the Methods, try to get a clear picture of what was doneat each step. What was actually measured? It is a good ideato make an outline and/or sketch of the procedures andinstruments. Keep notes of your questions; some of them maybe simply technical, but others may point to more fundamentalconsiderations that you will use for reflection and criticismbelow.In Results look carefully at the figures and tables, as theyare the heart of most papers. A scientist will often read thefigures and tables before deciding whether it is worthwhileto read the rest of the article! What does it mean to"understand" a figure? You understand a figure when you canredraw it and explain it in plain English words.The Discussion contains the conclusions that the author wouldlike to draw from the data. In some papers, this section hasa lot of interpretation and is very important. In any case,this is usually where the author reflects on the work and itsmeaning in relation to other findings and to the field ingeneral.D. Second discussion --comprehension. The second discussion can focus on comprehension of each section of the article. Students often avoid working with the figures and tables. Instead of whole-class discussions of these, you might want to assign small groups of the students to spend ten minutes in class redrawing figures and tables and preparing to explain them to everyone else.E. Third assignment--reflection and analysis. To integrate their knowledge and think about the article more critically, students usually need a third exposure. The student guidelines for this reading are as follows:After you understand the article and can summarize it, then you can return to broader questions and draw your own conclusions. It is very useful to keep track of your questions as you go along, returning to see whetherthey have been answered. Often, the simple questions may contain the seeds of very deep thoughts about the work--for example, "Why did the authors use a questionnaire at the end of the month to find out about premenstrual tension? Wouldn't subjects forget or have trouble recalling?"Here are some questions that may be useful in analyzing various kinds of research papers:Introduction:∙What is the overall purpose of the research?∙How does the research fit into the context of its field? Is it, for example, attempting to settle a controversy? show thevalidity of a new technique? open up a new field of inquiry?∙Do you agree with the author's rationale for studying the question in this way?Methods:∙Were the measurements appropriate for the questions the researcher was approaching?∙Often, researchers need to use "indicators" because they cannot measure something directly--for example, usingbabies' birthweight to indicate nutritional status. Were themeasures in this research clearly related to the variablesin which the researchers (or you) were interested?∙If human subjects were studied, do they fairly represent the populations under study?Results∙What is the one major finding?∙Were enough of the data presented so that you feel you can judge for yourself how the experiment turned out?∙Did you see patterns or trends in the data that the author did not mention? Were there problems that were not addressed? Discussion∙Do you agree with the conclusions drawn from the data?∙Are these conclusions over-generalized or appropriately careful?∙Are there other factors that could have influenced, or accounted for, the results?What further experiments would you think of, to continue the research or to answer remaining questions?F. Third discussion--reflection and analysis. This is the opportunity to set the article in a larger context, to understand its relation to text material, and to encourage students to think beyond the outlines of the article, examining other factors that may not have been explored in the research. The questions above are a good basis for discussion. You may wish to break students into small groups to reflect on particular questions and present their ideas to the larger group. This discussion may take less than a full class period.If students are advanced or if the article is relatively easy for them, you may combine the second and third assignments and discussions, but we have found that allowing ample time is key to allowing all students to reach a good level of understanding.REFERENCESH.T. Epstein. 1972. An experiment in education. Nature 235 203-5.Ann P. Woodhull-McNeal, 1989. Teaching science as inquiry: a course example. College Teaching 37(1):3-7.。

How to Read a Scientific Paper (如何阅读科学性论文)

How to Read a Scientific PaperThe main purpose of a scientific paper is to report new results, usually experimental, and to relate these results to previous knowledge in the field. Papers are one of the most important ways that we communicate with one another.In understanding how to read a paper, we need to start at the beginning with a few preliminaries. We then address the main questions that will enable you to understand and evaluate the paper.1. How are papers organized?2. How do I prepare to read a paper, particularly in an area not so familiar to me?3. What difficulties can I expect?4. How do I understand and evaluate the contents of the paper?1. Organization of a paperIn most scientific journals, scientific papers follow a standard format. They are divided into several sections, and each section serves a specific purpose in the paper. We first describe the standard format, then some variations on that format.A paper begins with a short Summary or Abstract. Generally, it gives a brief background to the topic; describes concisely the major findings of the paper; and relates these findings to the field of study. As will be seen, this logical order is also that of the paper as a whole.The next section of the paper is the Introduction. In many journals this section is not given a title. As its name implies, this section presents the background knowledge necessary for the reader to understand why the findings of the paper are an advance on the knowledge in the field. Typically, the Introduction describes first the accepted state of knowledge in a specialized field; then it focuses more specifically on a particular aspect, usually describing a finding or set of findings that led directly to the work described in the paper. If the authors are testing a hypothesis, the source of that hypothesis is spelled out, findings are given with which it is consistent, and one or more predictions are given. In many papers, one or several major conclusions of the paper are presented at the end of this section, so that the reader knows the major answers to the questions just posed. Papers more descriptive or comparative in nature may begin with an introduction to an area which interests the authors, or the need for a broader database.The next section of most papers is the Materials and Methods. In some journals this section is the last one. Its purpose is to describe the materials used in the experiments and the methods by which the experiments were carried out. In principle, this description should be detailed enough to allow other researchers to replicate the work. In practice, these descriptions are often highly compressed, and they often refer back to previous papers by the authors.The third section is usually Results. This section describes the experiments and the reasons they were done. Generally, the logic of the Results section follows directly from that of the Introduction. That is, the Introduction poses the questions addressed in the early part of Results. Beyond this point, the organization of Results differs from one paper to another. In some papers, the results are presented without extensive discussion, which is reserved for the following section. This is appropriate when the data in the early parts do not need to be interpreted extensively to understand why the later experiments were done. In other papers, results are given, and then they are interpreted, perhaps taken together with other findings not in the paper, so as to give the logical basis for later experiments.The fourth section is the Discussion. This section serves several purposes. First, the data in the paper are interpreted; that is, they are analyzed to show what the authors believe the data show. Any limitations to the interpretations should be acknowledged, and fact should clearly be separated from speculation. Second, the findings of the paper are related to other findings in the field. This serves to show how the findings contribute to knowledge, or correct the errors of previous work. As stated, some of these logical arguments are often found in the Results when it is necessary to clarify why later experiments were carried out. Although you might argue that in this case the discussion material should be presented in the Introduction, more often you cannot grasp its significance until the first part of Results is given.Finally, papers usually have a short Acknowledgements section, in which various contributions of other workers are recognized, followed by a Reference list giving references to papers and other works cited in the text.Papers also contain several Figures and Tables. These contain data described in the paper. The figures and tables also have legends, whose purpose is to give details of the particular experiment or experiments shown there. Typically, if a procedure is used only once in a paper, these details are described in Materials and Methods, and the Figure or Table legend refers back to that description. If a procedure is used repeatedly, however, a general description is given in Materials and Methods, and the details for a particular experiment are given in the Table or Figure legend.Variations on the organization of a paperIn most scientific journals, the above format is followed. Occasionally, the Results and Discussion are combined, in cases in which the data need extensive discussion toallow the reader to follow the train of logic developed in the course of the research.As stated, in some journals, Materials and Methods follows the Discussion. In certain older papers, the Summary was given at the end of the paper.The formats for two widely-read journals, Science and Nature, differ markedly from the above outline. These journals reach a wide audience, and many authors wish to publish in them; accordingly, the space limitations on the papers are severe, and the prose is usually highly compressed. In both journals, there are no discrete sections, except for a short abstract and a reference list. In Science, the abstract is self-contained; in Nature, the abstract also serves as a brief introduction to the paper. Experimental details are usually given either in endnotes (for Science) or Figure and Table legends and a short Methods section (in Nature). Authors often try to circumvent length limitations by putting as much material as possible in these places. In addition, an increasingly common practice is to put a substantial fraction of the less-important material, and much of the methodology, into Supplemental Data that can be accessed online.Many other journals also have length limitations, which similarly lead to a need for conciseness. For example, the Proceedings of the National Academy ofSciences (PNAS) has a six-page limit;Cell severely edits many papers to shorten them, and has a short word limit in the abstract; and so on.In response to the pressure to edit and make the paper concise, many authors chooseto condense or, more typically, omit the logical connections that would make the flow of the paper easy. In addition, much of the background that would make the paper accessible to a wider audience is condensed or omitted, so that the less-informed reader has to consult a review article or previous papers to make sense of what the issues are and why they are important. Finally, again, authors often circumvent page limitations by putting crucial details into the Figure and Table legends, especially when (as in PNAS) these are set in smaller type. Fortunately, the recent widespread practice of putting less-critical material into online supplemental material has lessened the pressure to compress content so drastically, but it is still a problem for older papers.Back to outline2. Reading a scientific paperAlthough it is tempting to read the paper straight through as you would do with most text, it is more efficient to organize the way you read. Generally, you first read the Abstract in order to understand the major points of the work. The extent of background assumed by different authors, and allowed by the journal, also varies as just discussed.One extremely useful habit in reading a paper is to read the Title and the Abstract and, before going on, review in your mind what you know about the topic. This serves several purposes. First, it clarifies whether you in fact know enough background to appreciate the paper. If not, you might choose to read the background in a review or textbook, as appropriate.Second, it refreshes your memory about the topic. Third, and perhaps most importantly, it helps you as the reader integrate the new information into your previous knowledge about the topic. That is, it is used as a part of the self-education process that any professional must continue throughout his/her career.If you are very familiar with the field, the Introduction can be skimmed or even skipped. As stated above, the logical flow of most papers goes straight from the Introduction to Results; accordingly, the paper should be read in that way as well, skipping Materials and Methods and referring back to this section as needed to clarify what was actually done. A reader familiar with the field who is interested in a particular point given in the Abstract often skips directly to the relevant section of the Results, and from there to the Discussion for interpretation of the findings. This is only easy to do if the paper is organized properly.CodewordsMany papers contain shorthand phrases that we might term 'codewords', since they have connotations that are generally not explicit. In many papers, not all the experimental data are shown, but referred to by "(data not shown)". This is often for reasons of space; the practice is accepted when the authors have documented their competence to do the experiments properly (usually in previous papers). Two other codewords are "unpublished data" and "preliminary data". The former can either mean that the data are not of publishable quality or that the work is part of a larger story that will one day be published. The latter means different things to different people, but one connotation is that the experiment was done only once.Back to outline3. Difficulties in reading a paperSeveral difficulties confront the reader, particularly one who is not familiar with the field. As discussed above, it may be necessary to bring yourself up to speed before beginning a paper, no matter how well written it is. Be aware, however, that although some problems may lie in the reader, many are the fault of the writer.One major problem is that many papers are poorly written. Some scientists are poor writers. Many others do not enjoy writing, and do not take the time or effort to ensure that the prose is clear and logical. Also, the author is typically so familiar with the material that it is difficult to step back and see it from the point of view of a reader notfamiliar with the topic and for whom the paper is just another of a large stack of papers that need to be read.Bad writing has several consequences for the reader. First, the logical connections are often left out. Instead of saying why an experiment was done, or what ideas were being tested, the experiment is simply described. Second, papers are often cluttered with a great deal of jargon. Third, the authors often do not provide a clear road-map through the paper; side issues and fine points are given equal air time with the main logical thread, and the reader loses this thread. In better writing, these side issues are relegated to Figure legends, Materials and Methods, or online Supplemental Material, or else clearly identified as side issues, so as not to distract the reader.Another major difficulty arises when the reader seeks to understand just what the experiment was. All too often, authors refer back to previous papers; these refer in turn to previous papers in a long chain. Often that chain ends in a paper that describes several methods, and it is unclear which was used. Or the chain ends in a journal with severe space limitations, and the description is so compressed as to be unclear. More often, the descriptions are simply not well-written, so that it is ambiguous what was done.Other difficulties arise when the authors are uncritical about their experiments; if they firmly believe a particular model, they may not be open-minded about other possibilities. These may not be tested experimentally, and may even go unmentioned in the Discussion. Still another, related problem is that many authors do not clearly distinguish between fact and speculation, especially in the Discussion. This makes it difficult for the reader to know how well-established are the "facts" under discussion.One final problem arises from the sociology of science. Many authors are ambitious and wish to publish in trendy journals. As a consequence, they overstate the importance of their findings, or put a speculation into the title in a way that makes it sound like a well-established finding. Another example of this approach is the "Assertive Sentence Title", which presents a major conclusion of the paper as a declarative sentence (such as "LexA is a repressor of the recA and lexA genes"). This trend is becoming prevalent; look at recent issues of Cell for examples. It's not so bad when the assertive sentence is well-documented (as it was in the example given), but all too often the assertive sentence is nothing more than a speculation, and the hasty reader may well conclude that the issue is settled when it isn't.These last factors represent the public relations side of a competitive field. This behavior is understandable, if not praiseworthy. But when the authors mislead the reader as to what is firmly established and what is speculation, it is hard, especially for the novice, to know what is settled and what is not. A careful evaluation is necessary, as we now discuss.Back to outline4. Evaluating a paperA thorough understanding and evaluation of a paper involves answering several questions:a. What questions does the paper address?b. What are the main conclusions of the paper?c. What evidence supports those conclusions?d. Do the data actually support the conclusions?e. What is the quality of the evidence?f. Why are the conclusions important?a. What questions does the paper address?Before addressing this question, we need to be aware that research in biochemistry and molecular biology can be of several different types:Type of research Question asked:Descriptive What is there? What do we see?ComparativeHow does it compare to other organisms? Are our findings general?Analytical How does it work? What is themechanism?Descriptive research often takes place in the early stages of our understanding of a system. We can't formulate hypotheses about how a system works, or what its interconnections are, until we know what is there. Typical descriptive approaches in molecular biology are DNA sequencing and DNA microarray approaches. In biochemistry, one could regard x-ray crystallography as a descriptive endeavor. Comparative research often takes place when we are asking how general a finding is. Is it specific to my particular organism, or is it broadly applicable? A typicalcomparative approach would be comparing the sequence of a gene from one organism with that from the other organisms in which that gene is found. One example of this is the observation that the actin genes from humans and budding yeast are 89% identical and 96% similar.Analytical research generally takes place when we know enough to begin formulating hypotheses about how a system works, about how the parts are interconnected, and what the causal connections are. A typical analytical approach would be to devise two (or more) alternative hypotheses about how a system operates. These hypotheses would all be consistent with current knowledge about the system. Ideally, the approach would devise a set of experiments todistinguish among these hypotheses. A classic example is the Meselson-Stahl experiment.Of course, many papers are a combination of these approaches. For instance, researchers might sequence a gene from their model organism; compare its sequence to homologous genes from other organisms; use this comparison to devise a hypothesis for the function of the gene product; and test this hypothesis by making a site-directed change in the gene and asking how that affects the phenotype of the organism and/or the biochemical function of the gene product.Being aware that not all papers have the same approach can orient you towards recognizing the major questions that a paper addresses.What are these questions? In a well-written paper, as described above, the Introduction generally goes from the general to the specific, eventually framing a question or set of questions. This is a good starting place. In addition, the results of experiments usually raise additional questions, which the authors may attempt to answer. These questions usually become evident only in the Results section.Back to Evaluating a paperb. What are the main conclusions of the paper?This question can often be answered in a preliminary way by studying the abstract of the paper. Here the authors highlight what they think are the key points. This is not enough, because abstracts often have severe space constraints, but it can serve as a starting point. Still, you need to read the paper with this question in mind.Back to Evaluating a paperc. What evidence supports those conclusions?Generally, you can get a pretty good idea about this from the Results section. The description of the findings points to the relevant tables and figures. This is easiest when there is one primary experiment to support a point. However, it is often the casethat several different experiments or approaches combine to support a particular conclusion. For example, the first experiment might have several possible interpretations, and the later ones are designed to distinguish among these.In the ideal case, the Discussion begins with a section of the form "Three lines of evidence provide support for the conclusion that... First, ...Second,... etc." However, difficulties can arise when the paper is poorly written (see above). The authors often do not present a concise summary of this type, leaving you to make it yourself. A skeptic might argue that in such cases the logical structure of the argument is weak and is omitted on purpose! In any case, you need to be sure that you understand the relationship between the data and the conclusions.Back to Evaluating a paperd. Do the data actually support the conclusions?One major advantage of doing this is that it helps you to evaluate whether the conclusion is sound. If we assume for the moment that the data are believable (see next section), it still might be the case that the data do not actually support the conclusion the authors wish to reach. There are at least two different ways this can happen:i. The logical connection between the data and the interpretation is not soundii. There might be other interpretations that might be consistent with the data.One important aspect to look for is whether the authors take multiple approaches to answering a question. Do they have multiple lines of evidence, from different directions, supporting their conclusions? If there is only one line of evidence, it is more likely that it could be interpreted in a different way; multiple approaches make the argument more persuasive.Another thing to look for is implicit or hidden assumptions used by the authors in interpreting their data. This can be hard to do, unless you understand the field thoroughly.Back to Evaluating a papere. What is the quality of that evidence?This is the hardest question to answer, for novices and experts alike. At the same time, it is one of the most important skills to learn as a young scientist. It involves a major reorientation from being a relatively passive consumer of information and ideas to an active producer and critical evaluator of them. This is not easy and takes years to master. Beginning scientists often wonder, "Who am I to question these authorities?After all the paper was published in a top journal, so the authors must have a high standing, and the work must have received a critical review by experts." Unfortunately, that's not always the case. In any case, developing your ability to evaluate evidence is one of the hardest and most important aspects of learning to be a critical scientist and reader.How can you evaluate the evidence?First, you need to understand thoroughly the methods used in the experiments. Often these are described poorly or not at all (see above). The details are often missing, but more importantly the authors usually assume that the reader has a general knowledge of common methods in the field (such as immunoblotting, cloning, genetic methods, or DNase I footprinting). If you lack this knowledge, as discussed above you have to make the extra effort to inform yourself about the basic methodology before you can evaluate the data.Sometimes you have to trace back the details of the methods if they are important. The increasing availability of journals on the Web has made this easier by obviating the need to find a hard-copy issue, e.g. in the library. A comprehensive listing of journals relevant to this course, developed by the Science Library, allows access to most of the listed volumes from any computer at the University; a second list at the Arizona Health Sciences Library includes some other journals, again from University computers.Second, you need to know the limitations of the methodology. Every method has limitations, and if the experiments are not done correctly they can't be interpreted.For instance, an immunoblot is not a very quantitative method. Moreover, in a certain range of protein the signal increases (that is, the signal is at least roughly "linear"), but above a certain amount of protein the signal no longer increases. Therefore, to use this method correctly one needs a standard curve that shows that the experimental lanes are in a linear range. Often, the authors will not show this standard curve, but they should state that such curves were done. If you don't see such an assertion, it could of course result from bad writing, but it might also not have been done. If it wasn't done, a dark band might mean "there is this much protein or an indefinite amount more".Third, importantly, you need to distinguish between what the data show and what the authors say they show. The latter is really an interpretation on the authors' part, though it is generally not stated to be an interpretation. Papers usually state something like "the data in Fig. x show that ...". This is the authors' interpretation of the data. Do you interpret it the same way? You need to look carefully at the data to ensure that they really do show what the authors say they do. You can only do this effectively if you understand the methods and their limitations.Fourth, it is often helpful to look at the original journal, or its electronic counterpart, instead of a photocopy. Particularly for half-tone figures such as photos of gels or autoradiograms, the contrast is distorted, usually increased, by photocopying, so that the data are misrepresented.Fifth, you should ask if the proper controls are present. Controls tell us that nature is behaving the way we expect it to under the conditions of the experiment (see here for more details). If the controls are missing, it is harder to be confident that the results really show what is happening in the experiment. You should try to develop the habit of asking "where are the controls?" and looking for them.Back to Evaluating a paperf. Why are the conclusions important?Do the conclusions make a significant advance in our knowledge? Do they lead to new insights, or even new research directions?Again, answering these questions requires that you understand the field relatively well.。

[初中英语作文]关于读书的英语作文「带翻译」(精选10篇)

[初中英语作文]关于读书的英语作文「带翻译」（精选10篇）关于读书的英语作文「带翻译」（精选10篇）As is well known, books teach us to learn life, truth, science and many other useful things. They increase our knowledge, broaden our minds and strengthen our character. In other words, they are our good teachers and wise friends. This is the reason why our parents always encourage us to read more books.Reading is a good thing, but we must pay great attention to the choice of books. It is true that we can derive benefits from good books. However, bad books will do us more harm than good.如众所周知，书籍教我们学习人生，真理，科学以及其它许多有用的东西，关于读书的英语。

它们增加我们的知识，扩大我们的心胸并加强我们的品格。

换句话说，它们是我们的良师益友。

这是为什么我们的父母终是鼓励我们要多读书的理由。

读书是一好事，但我们必须多加注意书的选择，我们能从好书中获得益处。

然而，坏书却对我们有害无益。

Its generally considered that reading do a lot of benefit to our students.Not only can it make our after-school life more meaningful and l,but it can expand our horizons.As a result,with reading more,we would grow into a better person.However, in current days,many of us spend most of the leisure time in playing games or surfing the internet,instead of reading. its a pity to find it less and less our students are interesting in reading,or have formed a habit of reading.So,in order to revive reading,this beneficial activity,wed better take action right now.Lets read together,learn together and grow !人们普遍认为阅读做了很多有益于我们。

在线阅读和纸质阅读英语作文

在线阅读和纸质阅读英语作文英文回答：Online and print reading are two distinct experiences with their own unique advantages and disadvantages. While online reading offers convenience, accessibility, and a wide range of options, print reading provides a more immersive and tactile experience. Ultimately, the best reading format depends on individual preferences and the specific reading material.Online reading has become increasingly popular due to its ease of use. With a few clicks, readers can access countless articles, books, and other digital content from anywhere with an internet connection. This convenience makes it an ideal choice for busy individuals who want to fit reading into their schedules. Additionally, online reading platforms often offer a variety of features such as text-to-speech, translation, and note-taking, which can enhance the reading experience.Accessibility is another major advantage of online reading. Digital content can be accessed by anyone with an internet connection, regardless of geographic location or socioeconomic status. This makes it a valuable tool for education, research, and personal enrichment.However, online reading can also have its drawbacks. One of the main concerns is the potential for distractions. With the constant availability of social media, email, and other notifications, it can be difficult to focus on reading for extended periods of time. Additionally, the glare from electronic devices can cause eye strain and fatigue.Print reading, on the other hand, offers a more immersive and tactile experience. Physically interacting with a book or magazine can help readers feel more connected to the content. The tactile sensations of turning pages and the smell of paper can create a more engaging and memorable reading experience.Studies have shown that print reading may also have cognitive benefits. Reading from a physical book has been linked to improved comprehension, memory, and attention span. Additionally, the lack of distractions associatedwith print reading can help readers stay focused for longer periods of time.However, print reading is not without its limitations. One of the main drawbacks is the lack of accessibility. Physical books and magazines can be expensive and difficult to obtain, especially in remote areas or for individualswith disabilities. Additionally, print reading requires a significant amount of space for storage.Ultimately, the best reading format depends onindividual preferences and the specific reading material. For convenience, accessibility, and a wide range of options, online reading is an excellent choice. For a more immersive and tactile experience, print reading is the preferred option.中文回答：网上阅读与纸质阅读。