How to Read Coronavirus Studies Like a Scientist

Carl Zimmer, "How to Read Coronavirus Studies Like a Scientist." New York Times, Jun 2, 2020, p. D7.

     The National Library of Medicine's Database at the start of June contains over 17,000 published papers about he new coronavirus.  A website called bioRxiv, which hosts studies that have yet to go through peer review, contains over 4,000 papers.
     In earlier times, few people aside from scientists would have laid eyes on these papers.  Months or years after they were written, they'd wind up in printed journals tucked away on a library shelf.  But now the world can surf the rising tide of research on the new coronavirus. The vast majority of papers about it can be read free online.
     But just because scientific papers are easier to get hold of doesn't mean that they are easier to make sense of.  Reading them can be a challenge for the layperson, even one with some science education.  It's not just the jargon that scientists use to compress a lot of results into a small space. Just like sonnets, sagas and short stories, scientific papers are a genre with its own unwritten rules, rules that have developed over generations. 

COMMENT

   This article offers a variation of the library "dusty shelves" with unread articles tucked away until they were rescued by online distribution. Many publishers have made COVID-19 studies open-access, but in fact there are usually paywalls between laypeople and scientific journal  literature.   The article offers helpful advice for how to approach scientific literature.  The article mentions NLM databases and a medical pre-print archive.  Medical information has its own unique information system because it can be so urgent for doctors and public health agencies to have up-to-date research.