Science schmience: How to make sense of a published study

Maybe you’re that rare person who takes to science like a duck takes to water, but let’s face it, most of us aren’t. Science can be a struggle, each discipline with its own language and secret handshakes.

It would be one thing if you could ignore science, but it’s impossible to escape. Scientists study everything, so if you’re interested in anything at all, there’s a science for it.

Social networking? That’s a science. Marketing? Science there too. Pondering the mysteries of the universe? See the physics department. Been pounding on your keyboard like a monkey? Anthropology and evolutionary biology have got you covered.

At some point, you may very well want to read and understand a published scientific study for the sole purpose of writing about it. Sure, you could rely on somebody else’s summary and hope they got it right, but why take that chance when you can do it yourself?

Below I’ll give you the basic tools for cracking open a study.

An example to illustrate

Let’s use a study published in the Public Library of Science. PLOS offers its studies free to the public. This is very handy if you don’t have access to the journal databases found at universities and public libraries. PLOS papers also tend to be reader friendly.

PLOS is a peer-reviewed online journal. Peer review is the gold standard of published research. Anonymous reviewers within the author’s field decide whether to reject the paper, demand major revisions, or recommend it for publication. This system is designed to keep scientists honest and their work up to snuff.

Take a look at “Lifespan Mental Activity Predicts Diminished Rate of Hippocampal Atrophy.”

Yes, the title is a bit off-putting, but the study covers a topic that a lot of non-science people care about: preventing dementia in old age. The gist here is that people in the study who performed mentally complex activities over time had less shrinkage in a critical part of their brains than did study subjects who were less mentally active.

There’s your hook right there: Blogging might be good for your brain!

How to read the paper

Scientific papers are broken into sections that are best read out of order. The headings for each section may vary from publication to publication, but the general concept is the same. Here I’ve identified each of those sections in the order that you should read them.

1. The Abstract

Usually 250 to 300 words. A good abstract identifies the research problem (aka the question), the study’s objective, the methods used and the findings.

In our example, the abstract is especially reader-friendly, it spells out the entire study: Objective, Methods, Results and Conclusions. You might be tempted to stop right there, but there’s a lot to gain from reading further.

This study’s abstract tells you right from the get-go why it’s important:

Epidemiological studies suggest that complex mental activity may reduce the risk for dementia, however an underlying mechanism remains unclear.

It also gives you a summary of the study’s conclusion:

High level of complex mental activity across the lifespan was correlated with a reduced rate of hippocampal atrophy.

You may not be sure exactly what hippocampal atrophy is, but you know to look for that term as you continue your search.

2. Charts and Graphs

Flip (or scroll) through the paper and take a look at the figures used. You may not always understand them, but they illustrate the author’s most important findings.

In our example, this one in particular should stand out.

The caption to Figure 3 tells us that we’re looking at hippocampal volumes for people with low and high LEQ after three years. If you look back at the abstract, you see that LEQ stands for Lifetime of Experiences Questionnaire. Now we’re getting somewhere.

3. Conclusion

Go ahead and see how the study ends. Especially when you’re not familiar with the subject, it helps to know where things are going.

In the PLOS example, the paper doesn’t have a conclusion section. It actually ends with the Materials and Methods section. Unless you know the science or are really curious, you can skip the Methods section.

Most journals publish papers with some kind of conclusion, recommendation or discussion section at the end.

4. Introduction

This contains what’s known as the literature review. In this section, the study is placed within the context of the research that has come before it. This is a great place to find information on why the study is important.

Sometimes an introduction can be tough reading. It helps to have an idea of what you’re looking for. And here we do: something about hippocampal atrophy and LEQ.

The intro is where you find this nugget:

Atrophy of the hippocampus is a sensitive biomarker for early AD (Alzheimer’s disease).

It also gives you the connection between LEQ and hippocampal volume:

Whether complex mental activity across the lifespan is related to hippocampal volume in late life, or the rate of hippocampal atrophy over time, has yet to be examined.

Now you know what they’re looking at and why. The million-dollar-question becomes, what did they find out?

5. Discussion

In the Discussion section, the author explains the findings documented in the Methods and Results section and spells out what they mean. Why are these findings important? How do they connect to the research question?

In this section you’ll find the following statements, all of which make excellent fodder for summarizing the study’s findings:

High LEQ individuals experienced an average loss of 3.6% of hippocampal volume over a three-year period, whilst low LEQ individuals exhibited more than twice this volumetric loss (8.3%).

Our results suggest that individuals with greater lifespan complex mental activity are at less risk for hippocampal atrophy and so provides primary in vivo human evidence for a structurally protective mechanism relevant to brain reserve theory.

It is therefore theorized that complex mental activity may contribute to defense against cognitive impairment via a neuroprotective mechanism in the medial temporal lobe.

Brain reserve theory and the importance of neuroprotective mechanisms in the medial temporal lobe are not important as far as you’re concerned. That gets into the arcane knowledge of brain science.

But from picking through the study in a methodical way and pulling out these pieces of information, you are able to write intelligently about it. You have a handle on the study.

The study in blog form

For an example of how this particular study is written up by a blogger, check out “Neuroprotective effect of lifelong mental activity” in the blog NeuroPhilosophy.

Granted, this blog is written by a graduate student in neuroscience, so his language tends toward the technical side, but his last three paragraphs do a nice job of explaining why this study is important in terms that a casual reader can appreciate.

These two sentences stand out:

These findings are not at all surprising, but they are significant, because the hippocampus and surrounding medial temporal lobe structures are the first to degenerate in Alzheimer’s Disease (AD).

… this study adds more weight to the idea that the risk of Alzheimer’s can be significantly reduced by making lifestyle changes.

Sound familiar? Also, note that he uses the brain imagery photo as well.

Fodder for generating original content

By taking the time to understand the basics of a scientific study, you give yourself the confidence and freedom to use that information as a springboard for creating original content.

It brings you that much closer to the source of information. Also, study authors are obligated to answer queries about their work. All studies include contact information for one of the authors. You will find contact info for the PLOS study in the gray box under the abstract.

Does blogging count as a complex mental activity? What about Twittering? What better way to find out than to ask an expert.

You just never know where this stuff might lead.

If you’re interested, PLOS has its own blog to keep you up to date on the studies it publishes. You can find it here.

If you’re still with me, you must be interested in this stuff. So what do you think? Easy enough? Harder than I make it sound? Worth a try? Questions?

Top photo by Tonyç