00:00Did anyone ever teach you how to read a scientific article? Chances are, you never received any training on how to read, but you're a graduate student
00:08Reading is the most important thing you can do
00:10We work in a knowledge economy; you've got to learn, imbibe information, digest it, and spit it back to make good sense of it for your research
00:17I'm Professor David Stuckler, and this is what I wish I had known as a graduate student
00:21It would have saved me so much time
00:22So many things I see from my students whom I’ve taught at Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, and now Bocconi in Milan, where I'm a full professor, are core skills—reading, writing, presenting—that they’re just expected to figure out, but they don't receive any training on them because our..
00:40Universities just aren't set up that way, but no more
00:42Today, I'm going to teach you the triple pass method for how to read a scientific article — a method that, when you apply it and you're going to feel good applying it, by the end of this video, is going to make it so easy to read, so fast, that you're going to be able to read, digest, and understand five scientific articles in the time that it took you to just read one
00:59This is going to be a lifesaver, and you're going to wonder why, just like I do, why universities don't teach this stuff
01:06Let's roll up our sleeves and dive straight in
01:08First, whenever you pick up a scientific paper, you need to know your why
01:13Define your why—why are you reading this paper? What do you want to get out of this paper? Why is it on..
01:21Are you doing your review at your desk or on your computer? Wherever it is, are you just trying to get a sense of what the current state of knowledge is? Are you trying to get information to back up a specific point you're making as you're writing? Are you doing a systematic literature review and actually having to extract key information from it? Or are you trying to do a critique, perhaps find more references? There are many different reasons to read a scientific paper, but you need to know for yourself why you are reading these papers, because that is going to shape the type of reading you do
01:45And yes, that's right, there is not just one way of reading, but multiple ways of reading
01:49In fact, there are three, and we're going to talk about them in the triple pass
01:54The way I start with the triple pass method is a little bit like Google Maps, which one of my favorite functionalities of Google Maps is the bird's-eye view, where you take a helicopter view of your city
02:04It's a perspective maybe you've never seen before unless you've flown around in a helicopter, and it's a cool way to get a different angle
02:08That's really the first pass of the triple pass: looking at a paper, taking a bird's-eye view of it, not fully reading it but just checking out the title, taking a glance at the abstract, scanning through it to see if this is something I want to go further with, or if this is something I actually need to read to fulfill my purpose when novices read and also gather information
02:32They often emphasize verbatim details, verbatim information like math equations, formulas, dates, facts, and figures, whereas experts tend to read to gather the gist
02:43It's kind of the crux of the idea, the core concept, the key information
02:48It's a little bit fuzzier; it's not as crisp and precise as verbatim information, but it's a lot more durable and easier to remember
02:54Experts read for the gist, and that's what you need to do
02:59Just in this first pass, what I call the bird's-eye view, you need to get the gist and understand whether this article is relevant to your purpose and what it's about
03:09Does it fit in your field? Is this something you want to explore further? Okay, fantastic
03:12So, if you decide to go further, now you move on to the second stage of the triple
03:17Pass, and we've been hanging around at the helicopter view, and I think of the second pass a bit like swooping—what hawks do when they're hanging out in the sky and they see a mouse, want to swoop in in a very forensic way and just pull out that mouse
03:29That is the swoop method—it's the second part of the triple pass—and this is what you're going to do in the vast majority of papers you're going to look at and read
03:40You might want to swoop to figure out what's the debate, what are the main research questions, what methods did they use, what did they find, where they're making conclusions
03:46You should be able to, if you're swooping, get some of these core details that you need for your purpose
03:53This swoop method only takes three to five minutes
03:54Now hang on, you're saying, wait, hey Professor Stuck, wait, this isn't—you're actually not teaching us how to read
04:00What is this? You're reading—you go from the introduction to the methods, the results, the conclusion
04:05You read it little by little
04:09Now, that is a mistake
04:13I don't want you to do that because that's a recipe for wasted time, being frustrated, and getting confused about details you don't need to know
04:17I can't even remember—look, I published over 30 papers last year in peer-reviewed journals, and I can't remember the last time I read a paper from start to finish because it's just not necessary
04:28You guys don't have infinite time, and you don't have time to waste
04:32You need to be efficient, understand why, and I'll bet that this swoop— The method is going to answer 97% of the questions that you need for reading a particular article
04:43There are some cases, as I said, where you do need to get dirty with the paper, roll up your sleeves, and at this point, you're probably going to need to print out the paper and maybe get a physical copy, make it your own if you like—highlighting, marking, and stuff up
04:50This is the time to do that
04:57Although I personally don't like a lot of rainbows of yellow and blue paint highlights on my paper, this is like the street-level view—we're now at Times Square in New York, and we can take a look around
05:04This is where we're getting eye-to-eye with the paper; this is where we're going deep
05:09The last time I did this was when I was doing a peer review, and I needed to go into..
05:13The paper and reconstruct what the authors did to gain a very deep knowledge of their methods and their findings in order to critique it
05:19This can also be done if you need to extract some detailed information that’s hidden and maybe you couldn’t get just using the swoop method alone
05:27I know, even when I critique papers for peer review, I don’t necessarily read it cover to cover
05:32I still start from the paper from the inside out
05:34I might read the methods and the results to try and reconstruct what the authors did, what they found, before going into more detail
05:42Maybe I read the conclusions and introduction to give them more rich and detailed feedback
05:45But again, I see so many students going to the third pass here of the..
05:51Triple pass method—sometimes they didn't even need to do it at all because the paper wasn't even relevant
05:55In one or two minutes, they could have kicked it out or gotten the main point just like that, hawk swooping down to get the detail
06:01Now, sometimes even doing this, students get a lot of frustration because the paper's complex, it's hard to follow, and they're losing so much time going in circles on this paper, unable to make sense of it
06:14You need to know, sometimes it's just terrible
06:16Academic authors are often not given much writing training; sometimes English is a second language
06:20Papers are not often edited effectively by journals themselves, and sometimes the writing is just awful
06:27It's hard to follow
06:29Go easy on yourselves, give yourselves a little bit of credit, and don't feel dumb, and slip into imposter syndrome
06:35Sometimes, the writing just is awful
06:37On the flip side, I want you to take notice when the writing is good because that's a very, very important clue for you that this is a paper you want to emulate
06:46And as you read a lot, you're going to start to notice commonalities in papers that are really easy to follow, even when they're on very complex subjects
06:52That has to do with writing effectively, and being good at reading is being good at writing in disguise
06:58If you do still find that you're struggling, a few practical things you can do include starting a journal club with other graduate students and sharing papers
07:06Digest them and collectively create a community of practice to support each other
07:09You can ask your mentors; they can also help you if it's a very critical paper or critical method that you need to replicate in your own studies
07:16Practice, of course, makes perfect
07:19There's no different from reading; reading is a skill to be able to extract and get that very quickly
07:23In that swoop method, it takes time
07:25When you've done this a few times, you will find it might be a shift from reading, especially if you've gone from introduction to conclusion before, but you will find you save so much time and you get really good at having laser-like focus, like that hawk just swooping out the details you need
07:38Finally, if the paper is just too difficult or too complex..
07:39You might not have the right training, or sometimes you just need to break bracket, move on to the next paper, and don't cause yourself that needless suffering
07:46Come back to it the next day or at a later point
07:48Finally, guys, I want to close with a rubber duck, and this rubber duck is something my professor at Yale gave me when I was reading
08:00It turned out that the writing of the paper was just terrible, and my professor explained, "Look, here's another paper on the same subject, so much clearer and easier to follow." There are just too many authors out there muddying the waters to make them appear deep—a phenomenon he called in sociology 'obscurantism,' and he just decried, didn't like the way the authors made things so much more complex
08:22Then they need to be
08:24So, give me this rubber duck, and he said, "Look, I want you to remember this moment, because this rubber duck is what computer scientists do when they have to debug code
08:31They actually talk aloud and explain it to the rubber duck
08:36If they have that level of clarity, they can often find where the bug is in their code." He said, "I want you to use this rubber duck as a model for yourself when you write, so that you don't inflict on others what those papers inflicted on you
08:48Make it so easy and simple that even your grandmother could understand
08:53Strip out the jargon and make it accessible." That's going to increase your audience and your impact
08:56I took a valuable lesson from that
09:01has helped my writing to this day, and has helped me get through even some more difficult papers
09:05I've learned to take it easy on myself and avoid, I have been able to avoid 90% of some torturous papers that I didn't need to go through, such as detailed methods that weren't even directly relevant to my method or field, by using this triple pass method
09:18Guys, I hope you got a lot of value out of this session
09:21Let me know in the comments below how you're getting on with the triple pass method
09:24Do you feel good swooping in? And for more soft skills like this, don't forget to join my exclusive Facebook group, Fast Track Grad, where we can directly communicate one-to-one, and I can give you the support that I wish I had as a graduate to truly thrive
09:38And guys, I'm gonna..
09:39Looking forward to seeing you in the next video.