The Non-Scientist’s Guide to Reading and Understanding a Scientific Paper

Scientists continue to work on improving their communication skills, but in the meantime how can the public interact with the leading science that should be informing our lives? With the ever-increasing number of “news” outlets, reporting, and sometimes distorting, scientific research studies things can get muddled quickly. Elysium Health provides a brief guide to help people find and understand the primary source—scientific articles. You can find the full article through medium.com.

The world and scientific discoveries it lends us can add so much wonder to our lives. If you don’t consider yourself a scientist, those discoveries “stuck” in scientific journals can feel inaccessible. With this short guide, and admittedly some practice, you might find those articles aren’t as daunting as you thought. Or they are, and that’s alright too. You are definitely not alone (as Adam Ruben describes in the account of reading articles in Science). But the information, and potential wonder, they hold might be worth giving it a shot at least.

If you have any questions about articles or journals to start with, please send your questions to erika@mahbonline.org. Happy reading!