Comment: Re:The main rule (Score 1) 410
I accidentally inhaled the fumes of 16 molar sulfuric acid in college chemistry lab because I was an idiot and didn't take it into the chemical hood before opening it. I head a headache for a week.
Comment: Wow (Score 1) 345
Pretty remarkable how Firefox was able to do this in just a few short years.
Summarizing Academic Papers
Submitted
by
Harry Khanna
Harry Khanna writes "During a typical day, I read a lot of academic papers in the field of medicine and biotechnology. Those of you who work with scholarly publications know that scientific writing can be rather dense, and there is a lot of material packed into a paper; a few days after reading one, I tend to forget many important details. To deal with this, I've developed a system to quickly summarize each paper, but I've always had the feeling there was a better or more efficient way of doing it and I'm curious to see how others keep track of what they read in academic publications.
The way I do it is by writing only one sentence for each paragraph in the Introduction. For the Results and Discussion I take each sub-heading and write it out word-for-word on my piece of paper along with one sentence describing any important findings or answering the question posed by the sub-heading. Then I write only one sentence for the Conclusion. In the margins I'll write where each figure takes place. For example, I'll write "Figure 3 shows this!" with an arrow to the sub-heading or finding. Sometimes if there is a key idea or message that is not clearly communicated in the summary, I'll draw a little light bulb on top of the paper with that idea. In all, this gives me a quick 1 page handwritten summary of a 10-page or more paper, and I can review the summary instead of re-reading the entire paper when I forget important details. Does anyone have a better way of doing this?"
The way I do it is by writing only one sentence for each paragraph in the Introduction. For the Results and Discussion I take each sub-heading and write it out word-for-word on my piece of paper along with one sentence describing any important findings or answering the question posed by the sub-heading. Then I write only one sentence for the Conclusion. In the margins I'll write where each figure takes place. For example, I'll write "Figure 3 shows this!" with an arrow to the sub-heading or finding. Sometimes if there is a key idea or message that is not clearly communicated in the summary, I'll draw a little light bulb on top of the paper with that idea. In all, this gives me a quick 1 page handwritten summary of a 10-page or more paper, and I can review the summary instead of re-reading the entire paper when I forget important details. Does anyone have a better way of doing this?"