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Scientific Papers: Methods to read with Lucidity

Introduction

Despite passing out of engineering, surpassing books and topics heavier than my body weight, I am yet to understand how to read those scientific papers with a sense of achievement.
Upon googling and pleading to a higher being for help, I figured that there are some hard and fast methods that you could apply while reading that highly complex literature. 

1. Communicate with the Paper

Think of the scientific paper as a girl/guy that is way out of your league. Muster some courage, crack your knuckles (Do some pre-reading about the topic) and approach the paper with the utmost respect and try to build an effective rapport with it. 
Try to think from the author's perspective and ask yourself why he would have written it in this manner, whether he stresses or repeats contents if you can see any patterns or techniques in the content that you can inculcate in your project or homework.
Ensure that you approach the paper with a goal, read the abstract before you dive in deep.

2.   Find your superhuman ability and put it to use

If you are the lazy but as curious as a cat as I am, you are likely to stall after reading a few lines just because you were unable to comprehend the underlying definitions and root causes of the paragraph. The only option here is to use tools ( foundational notes, videos) or guidance (such as your lecturers or smartass friends) which would help simplify the damn show that the author was trying to put up. Also, finding out what your learning style is would best help you understand and store info better for later use. 

Look at what one of the genius hotties at Harvard has to say...

"I will save informative sentences from each article about a specific topic in a Word document. I'll write comments along the way about new ideas I got or questions I need to explore further. Then, in the future, I’ll only need to read this document instead of re-reading all the individual papers.
Likewise, when I want to figure out how to conduct a particular experiment, I create a handy table in Excel summarizing how a variety of research teams went about doing a particular experiment."

- Lina A. Colucci, a doctoral candidate at the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology program.

3.   Dig into the graphs and illustrations

Consider providing special attention to why the author had put up these graphs over the possible those, and try to derive maximum information from them. Verify your findings from the graph with the content that author served you with and circle out the anomalies. Work on them and you will find yourself with less pity for your life. 

Conclusion

This is not the end, only the beginning! I will try to update this post with relevant info as and when I can, so do revisit if you liked it.

References:

http://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2016/03/how-seriously-read-scientific-paper


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