How to learn about science online.
A lot of the questions I get are easily answered with a Google search, or cracking open a textbook. But let’s try to be charitable and assume that those who ask these questions are simply ignorant. Being ignorant isn’t necessarily an insult: it’s an opportunity to learn. So here’s an attempt at educating you on how to educate yourself.
Suppose I wanted to learn about the horned toad. The most obvious first step is to check out Wikipedia.
The horned lizard can squirt blood out of its eyes. That sounds really interesting! I want to learn more about that. See those references at the end?
Those aren’t merely decorative. I’m going to let you in on a secret trick. Suppose you’re writing a paper and Wikipedia isn’t an acceptable reference. You can just go to Wikipedia, check out their references, and cite those instead! It’s not cheating if you actually read the references and use the information contained in them.
Off to Google we go. Google Scholar is great for finding academic papers.
Unfortunately, there’s a problem. The paper is behind a paywall.
Luckily, there’s a workaround. Personally, I think all scientific information should be free to all. It’s especially staggering that the public pays for a lot of research, only for that research to then be locked behind the gates of outrageously priced academic journals–all the while, scientists are doing all the hard work, and there’s plenty of organizations (such as Google) that would host the information for free. Open journals are the future. But until such time, we might have to be a bit sneaky. Sci-hub.io is one such workaround. You might have to install a browser extension to get it to work. Yes, it’s a bit cumbersome, and no, I don’t know why it requires an extension to do the job when a website would do just fine–but you only have to do it once. If you can’t find something using Sci-Hub, you can ask on Reddit’s r/Scholar, but they’d appreciate it if you tried Sci-Hub first.
See that DOI number at the top? We’re going to paste that into Sci-Hub in order to obtain a juicy, blood-squirting PDF.
Whenever possible, I try to go directly to the sources. If you read a journalistic account–or worse, a blog on tumblr!–you’re one step removed from the source, and things get lost in translation. If other blogs then cite the first one, you’re even further removed. While academic prose can be dry, and some disciplines are heavy on math and therefore inaccessible to laymen, a surprising amount of scientific papers are rather easy to read. Even math-heavy papers usually state their conclusions and the implications in a somewhat accessible way in the abstract and conclusion parts of the paper.
I’ve just now learned that the taste of lizard blood scares off dogs. Nice.
While many technical terms are used in science, they’re usually defined either in the paper itself, or in a citation, and Wikipedia is very helpful when it comes to explaining technical terms and jargon. You can just repeat the process and obtain more papers, or more Wikipedia pages, and read until you find something you understand.
That’s a lot of work, I hear you say. Well, yes and no. Finding and downloading a paper takes all of two minutes. Reading takes a bit more time, especially if you need to track down additional papers to understand the first one, but that’s how you learn. Chances are you’ll learn more this way than your peers who merely perused a textbook or listened absentmindedly in a lecture, too. If you think this is a lot of work, well, don’t ask me to do it for you!
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