How to Read a Scientific Paper in Biomedical Sciences

Abstract

Navigating scientific literature is challenging, particularly for students unfamiliar with technical terms, jargon, and dense content. Many struggle to distill core messages or connect findings to broader scientific discussions. Beyond the built-in complexity of the papers themselves, the field of science often fails to consider other important challenges affecting comprehension. These include excessive jargon, language limitations, cultural variations in cognition, neurodivergence, and other factors related to readability. Despite abundant information, the lack of formal instruction in reading and interpreting research papers leaves students ill-equipped to engage critically with scientific literature. There is no one size-fits-all approach to tackle this issue. This book addresses these challenges by offering a structured guide to reading, summarizing, and analyzing scientific papers. Piloted in a mandatory science communication course at the University of Ottawa, the tools and strategies presented have been designed to enhance comprehension and critical thinking. Here, we build on case studies and open-access peer-reviewed publications from our team to guide students through key strategies for accurately identifying critical sections of research papers, preparing meaningful summaries, and articulating insightful questions for further discussion. Unlike other resources that focus solely on medical journals, this book provides strategies applicable across disciplines, reflecting on the interdisciplinary nature of today’s scientific inquiries. Additionally, this book compares student-generated summaries with ChatGPT outputs, highlighting the limitations of AI and the value of human insight in scientific interpretation. This Open Educational Resource empowers students to navigate and communicate science effectively.

In this book, we offer four interactive tools to guide and simplify the reading and comprehension of scientific literature. A dedicated repository web page hosts these tools, along with two separate files showcasing real examples of students who used the summary report sheet to build their summaries of two different papers. These examples are compared with summaries generated by ChatGPT using the same sheets. All documents are available as interactive PDFs and Word files, organized in the order they appear in the book. For the best experience, we recommend opening the PDF versions with a PDF reader such as Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Reader.

The first tool is the Words/Concepts Definitions Template, which allows students to record unfamiliar terms or concepts and define them in their own words.

The second tool, the Checklist, serves as a reading guide to help readers critically and actively evaluate a paper’s readability and quality during the initial reading.

The Score System builds on the checklist and provides a more advanced framework to objectively assess various sections of a paper, culminating in an overall score.

The final and primary tool is the Summary Report Sheet, designed to help users create a structured summary of the paper. This tool solidifies key concepts and minimizes the need to revisit the original paper, as the summary will serve as a standalone reference.

Finally, we included two files featuring examples of completed summary sheets by two different students—each file includes summary sheets of two papers filled by students and the same ones filled by ChatGPT—to illustrate the comparison.