Purpledev @Purpledev@cloudisland.nz
quick and dirty way to read a scientific paper
scientific papers can be broken into a few parts:
abstract: high level summary
introduction: why they're doing the thing, previous research on the topic
methods: what they did
results: how it came out
discussion: what they think about it
references: references
the mistake people make is to read the introduction, which makes sense because it's first, but it's rarely the interesting bit, and it's usually long and tedious because it's a review of previous literature. instead you want to skip straight to methods, results, and discussion. follow along if you have the technical expertise but if you don't you might also just want to skip straight to the discussion; there's no shame in that either, but note you'll need to have a general idea of the experiment in order to make sense of the discussion.
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