Description

Most academic fields document and communicate the knowledge that was gained by doing research in the form of research papers. Consequently, these papers are full of the latest information as to where the field is right now and where it is likely to go next. They also constitute a historical record of how the empirical edifice of any given field came to be. Thus, being able to gainfully read original research papers is an indispensable skill. Unless one is able to do that, one will have to rely on a summary by someone else, and this person might well have a limited understanding, misaligned interests or even both.

So being able to access this information yourself is important. But there are blocks on the road to understanding. Lots and lots of them, in fact

Research papers are written by experts, for experts. Thus, research papers tend to be full of specialized jargon while also leaving many important things unsaid as the authors can rely on the shared assumptions and tacit knowledge of the intended audience (Leonard & Sensiper, 1998). However, there are times when non-experts want or need to read a research paper, as in the case of students, journalists or simply interested laypeople. This is a problem, as the lack of common ground will make much of what is in the paper seem like gibberish (Clark & Brennan, 1991). Even worse, one cannot remember what one cannot understand (Bartlett, 1932), which means that even after heroically struggling through a paper, very little of this hard-won information will be retained long term. 

Moreover, a key intention of authors is to convey to other researchers what exactly took place in the study – in principle one should be able to replicate it from the information in the research report itself, something that is an increasingly critical consideration (OSC, 2015). Consequently, research papers tend to be chock full of technical details, not all of which are equally important to the overall point of a paper. There is probably no correlation between how easy something is to understand in a paper and how important it is. People tend to remember what they are able to understand – as non-experts won’t necessarily know what is important and what is not, this poses another problem: They might remember particulars that are easy to understand, like that there were 57 participants in the 2nd experiment, but which are of negligible significance in the bigger scheme of things. This issue is exacerbated by the fact that the retention of minutiae likely comes at the expense of more relevant information. People do not retain an accurate and comprehensive memory of the information that was actually presented. Rather, people’s long term memory performs a kind of compression operation and this compression happens in a semantic space – whatever meaning someone is able to extract is retained. Known as memory for “gist”, it is often surprisingly sparse and a caricature of the original information (Reyna & Brainerd, 1995).