An alternative introduction to reading and evaluating the primary literature for beginning graduate students

Advances in Physiology Education
David C Randall, Bobby R Baldridge

Abstract

Students are challenged in transitioning from acquiring knowledge and understanding through reading textbooks to their learning to select, read, evaluate, and synthesize the primary literature. A customary approach to teaching this transition to beginning graduate students is for a faculty member to assign "readings" from the recent literature that promise to become key publications; such assignments generally underscore recent, novel scientific content. We advocate here an alternative approach for coaching students very early in their training: first, to read, analyze, and discuss a paper that highlights critically important features of effective and valid experimental design; and, second, to study a paper that can be shown historically to have fundamentally changed the way in which physiological function is understood. We consider as an example of the first goal a study that purports to demonstrate a principle of thermoregulation, but that interaction between students and instructor reveals the study's lack of an essential control. The second goal requires sufficient time for the publication to concretely validate its contribution(s). The purpose is to identify those essential properties of the selected paper that contributed...Continue Reading

References

Nov 1, 1971·Proceedings of the Society for Experimental Biology and Medicine·E E Selkuri
Dec 1, 1962·Proceedings of the Society for Experimental Biology and Medicine·E E SELKURT
Feb 1, 1951·The American Journal of Physiology·A C BURTON

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