GENETICS – BIO 3303
Article Reading Assignment Guidelines
The ability to read peer-reviewed research articles is important for anyone planning to be a scientist! But approaching a paper can be tricky. Here are some guidelines for getting the most out of an article:
1. If you know absolutely nothing about the disease, condition, drug, or system being studied in the paper, read a Wikipedia/WebMD-type article about it before reading the paper. Even if the article you read is flawed, it will at least get you some basic background understanding of the topic. Also, don’t be afraid to ask a search engine if there are terms, abbreviations, or procedures you’ve never heard of in the paper.
2. Read the title. Most paper titles summarize either the hypothesis or the major conclusion of the study.
3. Look at the list of authors and the institutions/countries they are from. The first author is the person who actually did the work and wrote the document; he or she is usually either a grad student or an employed lab tech. The last author is the principal investigator, the person who designed and oversaw the project and secured the funding. Authors in the middle of the list usually made minor (sometimes very minor) contributions. If the authors come from a prestigious university, expect a big, flashy, high-tech experiment; from a less prestigious university, expect results that are just as good but perhaps required more creativity to get. If they’re from a corporation or drugmaker, you might need to be on the alert for financial motives behind findings.
4. Read the introduction section carefully. It gives you background information on the topic being studied, and any previous conclusions made by that lab.
5. It is unnecessary to retain every detail of Materials and Methods unless you’re planning to replicate the study, but as you skim this section look for key setup details such as…
a. If the study is of human subjects, how many people were included in the study? How were they recruited? Are they diverse, or do they all belong to a particular racial, ethnic, sex/gender, age, or socioeconomic group? (This is a known problem with Scandinavian correlation studies.) Would anything about the setup of the study preclude the ability to generalize its results to the broader human population? How many people were lost to follow-up or otherwise dropped from the study?
b. If the study involves animals, how many animals were used in the study? What was the genetic background of those animals? How was the disease or other experimental condition induced?
c. If the study utilizes cell lines, to what degree do the genetics of the cell line reflect a real, healthy cell? Are the cells from the same organism as the phenomenon being studied? Are the researchers certain that their cell line isn’t contaminated by HeLa cells?
d. Are the dosages of drugs reflective of what a patient might actually take, or were the authors going for the extreme case?
e. How were the images in the figures produced/processed? (They are required to disclose any Photoshopping/post-processing.)
6. Read the Results and Discussions section carefully; use the figures to help you understand what is being claimed or reported. As you decide whether the conclusions are sound or not, ask yourself…
a. If statistics were used in the analysis, were the results actually significant, or are the data being tortured? How big are the error bars on any graphs? Are they bigger or smaller than is reasonable for the type of data collected? Do they overlap? Are the authors all excited about something that, presented graphically, is actually a minor effect?
b. Were potentially confounding variables controlled well? Is there anything that the authors might not have thought of?
c. Did the technology used help or hinder the data-gathering process? Was the fancy equipment used really necessary, or were the authors just after a “gee-whiz” reaction from the reader? Would this experiment have been better performed with less (or more) use of technology?
d. Are the conclusions appropriate to their results? Were results over-interpreted? Under-interpreted? Are there obvious questions raised by the results that the authors ignore?
e. Are the conclusions of the article potentially controversial or otherwise endowed with political/moral/ethical significance? If so, could the authors’ objectivity have been compromised by their partisan/religious views or affiliations?
7. Briefly glance at the Acknowledgments. Who funded the study? Does the funding source potentially create motive for bad behavior?
