Scientific research is published in journals that come out weekly, monthly or less often. They are generally ‘peer reviewed’, meaning that articles (or ‘papers’) are read and approved by anonymous reviewers, chosen by the journal, who are experts in the particular field.
Being peer-reviewed doesn’t mean that the results of the research reported in an article are ‘right’. They may still be controversial, and even downright wrong!
There are hundreds of journals, from the general, such as Nature, to the specialised. Individual journals have an ‘impact rating’ which, together with the level of specificity of the journal, can give some sort of feeling for the status of the work being reported.
Work in one of the top journals such as Nature would be expected to be of wide importance to the scientific community. Letters in Natureare usually short articles that draw attention to results which are published in more detail in a more specific journal. More specialised but still high-impact journals carry work that’s thought to be important in their fields.
Papers are cited in different ways but the format always includes the names of the authors, the year of publication, the title of the article, the title of the journal, the volume number of the journal (which changes annually), sometimes the issue number of the journal, and the page number of the article. Page numbers can be surprisingly high for journals that are published frequently because they run continuously from the beginning of the year. From a citation, you should be able to track down at least the abstract (summary) of the article you want, which is often enough to give you the information you need.
Some journals are now ‘open access’, meaning they are freely available online and you don’t have to pay a subscription to read them. You can find these in the Directory of Open Source Journals, which allows you to search for particular articles within them.
Another way to find articles online is through Google Scholar. This incredibly useful tool will produce copies of a specific paper or its abstract if you paste the citation into the search box. You can also use it to find papers on general topics.
Make use of the fact that after each search result there is a link to ‘All x versions’. So if it finds six references to a particular paper, although five may only be the abstract, one may be the whole paper.
There are also a few journal databases which let you search abstracts. For the medical sciences, there is the free service PubMedwhere you cansearch papers by subject, journal, year or author. It also flags up where the full text of a paper is available free.
If you really need the full text to an article and haven’t been able to find it through any other means, then try emailing the ‘corresponding author’ (one is always nominated on the paper to deal with correspondence about the work). They are often more than happy to send you a copy.
A word of warning: one published paper, even in a good peer-reviewed journal, is never the ‘be all and end all’ of a subject. Always make sure you’re representing scientific opinion fairly by checking what else has been published on the topic. Many subjects are controversial, and some scientists hold views that others violently disagree with.
If a paper sounds truly unbelievable (such as the discovery of living dragons), check the publication date: some journals publish joke papers on 1 April that can catch out researchers many years later!
If you’re trying to keep up with new scientific findings in general, there are a few good sources of science news. Along with magazines like New Scientist, there is the free journalistic website Science Daily which publishes press releases from the world of science, giving references to the published paper so you can follow up the report in more depth.
Finally, in specialist areas there are often free mailing lists giving you direct correspondence immediately with a large number of scientists working in the field. This can be a hugely valuable resource for finding stories and contributors - but be careful not to overuse it: if everyone in the media flooded on to academic mailing lists we’d soon become very unpopular.
This blog post first appeared on Research Gateway, the BBC intranet site for Information and Archives.
