11/14/2021, jeff

in my opinion, the most frustrating barrier to people accessing academic science is the way that papers meant to convey knowledge are written. in my experience, scholarly articles follow a very specific writing convention, focusing on specificity and conciseness while sacrificing legibility and clarity. for academics, this is fine. for anyone else, it is garbage.

during my short time in academia, i read a lot of papers, and i wanted to pass along some of that experience to make reading scholarly articles a little easier. this is kind of like part one, where we’ll quickly go over the sections of a paper and then skim through a paper by bono & tarduno from 2015. this will give us a surface level understanding of the paper, but we'll miss the nitty-gritty details. if you want to follow along, you can find the article on sci-hub or rent it for 72 hours.

so, to start, most papers i've read are split into several sections:

• the abstract, which is essentially the paper’s elevator pitch. it will break down the main points of the paper in a few hundred words.
• the introduction, containing all of the background information. this will describe previous work in the field, as well as other necessary information.
• the methods, or how the study was performed. depending on the paper, this could be super short, or make up the bulk of the paper.
• the results, purely the data or information that was collected. no interpretations here.
• the discussion, where the authors interpret the results they obtained. this is where they’ll justify any claims they’ve made.
• the conclusion, which wraps everything up and lays out potential avenues for future work.

reading these sections in order can be a real test of endurance, so i'd avoid doing that at all costs. moving from the succinct abstract to the dense introduction can feel like running into a brick wall, so i'd start with the title and the abstract, then skip right to the conclusion. this should give you the big picture of what the article is about without getting bogged down in the details. lots of writers will put the spoilers in the title anyway.

let’s start with the title of the 2015 paper. it reads 'a stable ediacaran earth recorded by single silicate crystals of the ca. 565 ma sept-Îles intrusion'. i went easy on myself and picked a geology paper, but even without that knowledge, what can we grab from this title? the researchers here are studying crystals from 565 million years ago to tell them something about the earth as a whole. you can search for other terms that might not be super obvious, like 'ediacaran' (a period in earth's history from 635-542 million years ago) or 'silicate crystals' (small minerals made primarily of silicon and oxygen). i looked up where the sept-Îles intrusion is, it's way up north in quebec, canada. that’s a lot of information just from the title, which is a great start.

next up, we've got the abstract. for a surface level understanding, this is going to be your bread and butter. the authors' goal is to condense their entire paper into this short section, so if you get a handle on this, you've got a good idea of what they're trying to say. i'll do an initial read-through, skipping over stuff i don't understand and fixating on the stuff i do. after that, i'll read through it again with that added context, doing my best to understand the entire thing.

in the bono & tarduno paper, we get slapped right away by the wild and unruly 'inertial interchange true polar wander', or iitpw. the description afterwards is helpful, but if we power through to the next sentence, the real significance becomes clear: whatever iitpw is, it is believed to have driven the cambrian explosion, a significant biodiversity event in earth’s history. seems like not everyone agrees about this, so bono and tarduno are using paleomagnetic analyses of these single silicate crystals to 'examine this enigma'. the final sentences give away the ending, stating that the authors' results suggest that the cambrian explosion did not happen while iitpw was going on, and that whether iitpw happened at all is still up for debate.

next, i'd move on to the conclusion. a lot of the time, this serves to reinforce the assertions made in the abstract, along with some of the more helpful context from the introduction. i usually handle the conclusion the same way as the abstract, reading through a couple times, skimming at first, then really focusing in. i like the conclusions a lot because this is often where the authors are at their frankest. less frilly language, fewer shitty acronyms, just a lot of 'well damn, this isn't how i thought this would go' or 'yep, i was right, and all those idiots who told me i was wrong can eat my ass'. the paper we're reading along with doesn't have a conclusion (due to the constraints of the journal, geology), but in this case, we've got what we came for.

in fact, we already have 80% of the information the paper is trying to tell us. let's recap: the cambrian explosion (or ediacaran diversification) is believed by some to be related to a significant shift in the physical position of earth’s poles (the iitpw). we, the readers, may not know what paleomagnetic analyses refer to, but by applying this method to crystals found in rocks from 565 million years ago, the authors came to the conclusion that iitpw was not occurring during the cambrian explosion, and is therefore not a suitable explanation for its occurrence. boom. done and dusted.

this is a great start, and paints a great picture, but we’ve picked up only slightly more than we would have from a secondhand report on cnn. without digging any deeper, we’re trusting that the authors’ method is robust and that the results they found support their interpretation. if this is as far as you want to go, that’s fine! but if you want to get to the heart of how the authors conducted their study, we’ve got to keep pushing forward. i'll save that for the next post, though.

i hope this helps. if you have any questions, please feel free to get in touch.