Hints for digging into the scientific literature on your own
If you're online to be reading this, I'm sure you're down with Google and Wikipedia, which are fine places to start on a topic you don't know much about. But you certainly can't trust everything you read, and if you don't already know a bit about something, it can be hard to tell the difference between a genuine authority on the topic and a crackpot who has learned to sound authoritative. You probably also know about Google Scholar, which is Google for the scientific literature and other scholarly and academic stuff like patents and case law. I often find that it pulls up mostly older papers, and for topics I'm familiar with, I notice that it sometimes misses papers that I'd consider to be among the most important. Google Scholar may be particularly useful for people who already know a lot of advanced Google search tricks (which doesn't include me.)
If you aren't already familiar with PubMed (a service of the National Center for Biotechnology Information, part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health), it's a great free tool to find scientific papers on topics related to medicine, health, biomedical research, and related areas of biology. Basic searches are a simple as you'd expect, and advanced searches are powerful but pretty easy to construct. For example, this link performs a PubMed search for gut microbiota papers with the word obesity in the title. [Gut microbiota papers, as I constructed it for this search, are those with the words 'gut' or 'colon' or 'intestin*', along with the words 'microbiome' or 'microbiota', appearing in either the title or abstract of the paper. The wild card asterik in 'intestin*' lets it match 'intestine' and 'intestinal'.]
Once you're on the results page from a search, you can use filters on the left side to restrict the results further, for example, to show only review articles, in English, dealing with humans, published after 2012. On the right side of the page is a link to the subset of search results that have their full text available for free via PubMed Central, another NCBI service. An increasing number of scientific papers are published with immediate open access (meaning the full text is available to everyone free of charge), and even more papers have the full text available 6 months to a year after the publication date.
Clicking on an individual search result brings up a page with the abstract (summary) of the paper, with a link at the top right to the full text if it's available online (sometimes free, sometimes not). The right side of the page has a very helpful list of related papers (that might or might not have been found by your original search).
Don't be intimidated about diving into the scientific literature on a topic that interests you! Review articles that summarize previous research on a topic are good places to start, and abstracts are often written to be understood by scientists who aren't already experts on that particular topic. If this is your first foray into the research literature, don't be surprised if you find papers that report different, conflicting, or even contradictory results. Science is often messy, especially at the leading edge, so it may take years and many research studies before most scientists in a field agree with each other about a particular topic. Even then, they might be wrong!
Moral: Be skeptical and think for yourself. Compare multiple papers from different labs, assess the strength of the evidence not just the strength of the language used by the person writing the paper, think about the gaps and weaknesses scientists identify in their own work or in each other's work, and pay attention to potential conflicts of interest. Consider that definitive results even from the best studies may not generalize: what's found in mice might not be the same in humans; results for different groups of people may differ due to diet, genetics, geography, culture or historical factors; a helpful treatment for people who already have a disease may not be of any benefit at all for healthy people. Be cautious about results found in only one study, or by only one research group.
If you aren't already familiar with PubMed (a service of the National Center for Biotechnology Information, part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health), it's a great free tool to find scientific papers on topics related to medicine, health, biomedical research, and related areas of biology. Basic searches are a simple as you'd expect, and advanced searches are powerful but pretty easy to construct. For example, this link performs a PubMed search for gut microbiota papers with the word obesity in the title. [Gut microbiota papers, as I constructed it for this search, are those with the words 'gut' or 'colon' or 'intestin*', along with the words 'microbiome' or 'microbiota', appearing in either the title or abstract of the paper. The wild card asterik in 'intestin*' lets it match 'intestine' and 'intestinal'.]
Once you're on the results page from a search, you can use filters on the left side to restrict the results further, for example, to show only review articles, in English, dealing with humans, published after 2012. On the right side of the page is a link to the subset of search results that have their full text available for free via PubMed Central, another NCBI service. An increasing number of scientific papers are published with immediate open access (meaning the full text is available to everyone free of charge), and even more papers have the full text available 6 months to a year after the publication date.
Clicking on an individual search result brings up a page with the abstract (summary) of the paper, with a link at the top right to the full text if it's available online (sometimes free, sometimes not). The right side of the page has a very helpful list of related papers (that might or might not have been found by your original search).
Don't be intimidated about diving into the scientific literature on a topic that interests you! Review articles that summarize previous research on a topic are good places to start, and abstracts are often written to be understood by scientists who aren't already experts on that particular topic. If this is your first foray into the research literature, don't be surprised if you find papers that report different, conflicting, or even contradictory results. Science is often messy, especially at the leading edge, so it may take years and many research studies before most scientists in a field agree with each other about a particular topic. Even then, they might be wrong!
Moral: Be skeptical and think for yourself. Compare multiple papers from different labs, assess the strength of the evidence not just the strength of the language used by the person writing the paper, think about the gaps and weaknesses scientists identify in their own work or in each other's work, and pay attention to potential conflicts of interest. Consider that definitive results even from the best studies may not generalize: what's found in mice might not be the same in humans; results for different groups of people may differ due to diet, genetics, geography, culture or historical factors; a helpful treatment for people who already have a disease may not be of any benefit at all for healthy people. Be cautious about results found in only one study, or by only one research group.
