Speaker 1: Hello and welcome to the Soil Sisters channel. In this episode we're going to go over the tricky things known as scientific papers and how to effectively retain information from them. So reading and remembering these articles can help you become a better presenter, answer research questions fluidly, and demonstrate your mastery of your field. And for you graduate students, not only help you pass your qualifying exams, but help impress your qualifying exam committee. When my professors recommended a paper to read, I'd just read it, maybe highlight or underline some things, and write the important bits in a notebook. But if my professor then asked me about the paper later on, I could maybe spit out a few tidbits but couldn't remember most of it. So with my help today, you will learn how to easily digest and remember important articles and even recite from which papers you know what bit of information is coming from. And you'll also be able to back up any research conversation ever. So let's get started. Here are the things you're going to need. First thing you need to do is read the paper. You don't have to read it front to back, because it can be very dense and you might get very tired. And there might be things you don't really know about. You can read instead of front to back, you can read section by section. I will go through briefly each section and go over the importance of each section and what you should grasp from each section. So a few side notes. One, you don't need to understand everything in this paper. Two, take from it what only pertains to your research and your understanding. Three, it may take you a couple times to read this over and grasp enough from it. So the abstract is very dense. The abstract is a short paragraph and it is usually meant for the author to grab interest. They put in the gist of their paper and they also put in big key terms. So the introduction is a background or build up to the hypothesis. This will introduce new topics or if you are well aware of the field, there are topics you might already know and might be able to skim over. So the introduction is a quick read and a quick overview of the main point of the paper. And then towards the end of the introduction, here's the end of the introduction, usually they have the hypothesis. This is a paper that I do not know much about and I have gone over in detail over the background, which is new to me. If it is a paper that I am familiar with, I still like to go through the background to see how the author puts this information that I already know. So the methods and procedures is the one I tend to skip over most. The methods and procedures would be the recipe where you're adding chocolate chips to the cookie dough. This part is only helpful if you're curious about how this particular research was performed or if you yourself want to go through and do the exact same procedure. Results and discussion is perhaps one of the most important topics. This section is important because it goes over endpoints, goals, and data of the research. The discussion part also goes over how the author interprets the data. This part is the whole meat of the paper. Conclusions or implications. This section is easy to skim through or go through fast because you feel like you are at the end of the paper. This part, however, is important because it summarizes the whole research. It also goes into implications of their research and how this research could better advance their field. This is where you can discover and develop a new research project. References. Do not take this section for granted. This is a very important part of the paper as well. If you want to develop a better article database or library, you should go through and pick out the titles that you think might be of interest or even highlight the ones that you already have. So when you're going through this paper, you can see those references and highlight them. In my composition notebook, I can be as messy as I want. I will then go in and how I organize it is first write the author, the year, and the title at the top. And then I go through by section, introduction, results, discussion, conclusion, and I write the important parts from each section. Another thing that I will do is I will take figures and graphs and reprint them and stick them in my notebook if I find them very important to my understanding. Also going through and re-digesting this material, I will find the key words that I do not know or that I think I need to commit to memory. And I will go to my spiral bound notebook, which I have labeled jargon. So those words that I write in my journal, I then take my thin page flags and put the clear part over the word. Then I box in and write jargon next to it. So then I know to put this in my jargon notebook. With the paper, the term, and the definition. Now this is an important tool because you can flip it and quiz yourself where the term is on one side and the definition is on the other. Then as an organization tool, I will use my wide page flags and then I will put the last name of the author and the date the paper was written. So that in my notebook, I can easily turn to the author. These are my notes that I have gone over and made them in a better looking format, where I find them very aesthetically pleasing and very easy to go back to. And I find this method very effective. Better remember these important ideas. So this was my method of reading and redigesting scientific articles. And I hope you leave any questions in the comments below. And I hope you find this method very helpful to your scientific learning. Hope you have a great day and I hope you study long and prosper.