[ramraj07]

I want to pass forward words given to me during my masters (by a prof Michel Bouvier if interested) that has stuck with me forever, on how to read a paper:

1. Read the abstract super carefully. Typically nothing in a paper that’s not in the abstract should be considered as absolutely confirmed by that paper. 2. If you’re new to the field, you can read the introduction. Ideally you shouldn’t need to. 3. Directly skip to the FIGURES. You should not read the results section! That is textual interpretation of the results from the authors’ perspective. If the paper is half decent you shouldn’t need to, everything the paper tries to tell should be fully substantiated and synthesiZable from just the figures and the legend. Especially biology. 4. Most definitely absolutely skip the discussion, it’s literally what the authors want this paper to be and should not affect your judgement.

The most interesting part is this is hard for a beginner or someone outside the field. But I think this is a good yardstick - if you can’t impute the results from just looking at the figures, the combination of you and the paper is not sufficient for you to fully evaluate that scientific finding to any degree of certainty.

[bumby]

I can't help but think this is sometimes an excuse to not read the actual article. If one doesn't have the time to read it, that's understandable. But the best response would be to recuse yourself from the review rather than avoiding reading it. If it's unclear after reading it, it's fine to reject it but I think we owe it to the authors to at least read it in its entirety.

It's not uncommon to have to explain this to a junior researcher when they are confronted by review comments that were clearly already answered in text and the reviewer just didn't read it.[1] It does a disservice to the field and, IMO, is unprofessional.

[1] Before anyone jumps to conclusions like "Those questions should have been clear from the figures", sometime they are questions that are not suitable for being answered in figures. Examples being, "The research should have explained why these particular ML models were used" when the paragraphs directly state things like "These ML methods were chosen because..."

[ramraj07]

Uhm, I’m only talking about reading papers that are published. No way would I condone a reviewer doing this to a paper they are reviewing lol.

Also I emphasized that this is more true in biology. When there’s no math or software, there’s often nothing to gain from the text of the results. The evidence is supposed to be in the figures.

[bumby]

Oops, sorry for the misinterpretation but thank you for clarifying.