How To Read A Research Paper? (for Dummies)

The 'healthy' is important too!
See here for some balance. The idea is to read critically, but not cynically.

 

The article above is partly a response to this one: Lies, Damned Lies and Medical Science.
There's a link to this in the article above, but I'm including it here anyway, for the sake of completeness.

 

Just stay with Medline or Pubmed. When journals get shady - as some for-profit ventures do - then their big punishment is to be delisted from Pubmed. One example here.

 

Not necessarily. There's usually no reliable data supporting most of those. The science is getting trickier because:
(1) Too many scientists chasing limited funding. Competition leads to corner-cutting.
(2) Extremely complex technology and multy-disciplinary research, means no single person understands all aspects of the work. This in turn means that screw-ups can creep in. A single coding error - a floating point error of the sort that undrgrads are often tested on - caused an Ariane 5 rocket to crash. The more complex the research, the greater the possibility of error.
(3) There's money to be made in startups and IPOs and whatnot. Those days of Salk giving away the polio vaccine are over.

For a quick overview of weak research, hype, and a guide to spotting medical charlatanry, see:
Bad Science
Bad Pharma

Website:
badscience.net

TED Talk:
Ben Goldacre

Also see:
An American Sickness
The Truth About Drug Companies
Bitter Pill

 

Please don't get the wrong idea. I am NOT trying to depress you. Progress in medical research is very real and quite dramatic in some areas. I am simply trying to ensure that you make medical decisions responsibly, for your own well-being. After these caveats, we'll get to something a bit more useful perhaps.

 

Retraction Watch is a good resource for bringing bad actors to light.