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Updated in [July 25th, 2023]

Dr. Emma Nichols offers a course on How to Read and Interpret a Scientific Paper. This course is designed for grad students, patients, medical students, clinicians, and researchers who need to understand and make sense of scientific papers. With her PhD in molecular biology and Master's degree in technical communication, Dr. Nichols is well-qualified to teach this course. She has read many scientific papers in her time and has developed shortcuts to help save time.

This course will cover the structure of a scientific article, important terms related to study population and trial design, different study designs and their implications, terms used to describe results, statistical significance and confidence intervals, sensitivity and specificity, adverse events and placebo effect, impact factor and peer review. At the end, Dr. Nichols will discuss three papers and talk about how to approach reading them from the perspective of a patient, a clinician, and researcher, respectively.

Most sections are suitable for people without a strong science background, but there is one section that goes into detail about different ways to report results and might be a bit slow going for someone who is not familiar with the topic. Likewise, some basic knowledge of statistics is recommended.

Course Syllabus

Introduction

Structure of a Scientific Paper

Approach to reading a scientific paper

The methods section

The results section

Bonus section