Who cares?
- Context
- Practical reasons
- Ecology/conservation
- Scientific reasons
How to read a scientific paper
Advice from the American Society of Plant Biologists
- Parts of a paper (p. 4)
- How to read a paper (p. 5)
Rice university advice on how to read a paper
Variations
- Review papers
- Papers with the methods at the end
- Abbreviated, high impact papers (e.g., Science and Nature papers)
Other advice
- Don't hesitate to look up technical terms and methods
- See if there's a blog or news article that summarizes the paper (this will only be the case if the paper is very high impact)
- Diagram the methods to understand them better
Why do we study mammals? Discussion of recent papers
Round 1 (everyone in the breakout group will be looking at the same paper)
- Is there any jargon you need to look up?
- What is the problem this paper is trying to solve or the question it's trying to answer?
- What were the limitations of previous studies on this topic? Why was this study needed?
- Why did this study focus on a non-human mammal?
- How did this paper improve upon or expand on what was previously known?
- What new findings did this paper contribute? Why are those findings important?
Round 2 - Jigsaw (each breakout group should have 1 person representing each paper)
- Each team should briefly summarize the key points of the papers they read (about 2 minutes/paper)
- In what ways does the knowledge gained from these studies have a positive impact on human well-being?
- Is it significant that these studies focused on non-human mammals? Would they have been as informative if they had been done on humans?
- How can a mammalogist (someone who specializes in the biology of mammals) contribute to improving human well-being?
