Academic Journal Articles
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So I want to steal their idea and instead of just discussing the articles I’m going to take the abstracts from that are posted online and I’ll give a quick little summary of what they say, maybe mix in a little of my own thoughts.
Usually they are confusing because they use language we never talk and if you don’t know the format it can be even more insane to try and follow.
Usually they are confusing because they use language we never talk and if you don’t know the format it can be even more insane to try and follow.
A few quick notes about academic journals:
- The beginning of the abstracts can be confusing but it's to give credit to everyone involved. It’s like the credits of a movie, if you ignore them it’s easier to focus on the movie but if you want to see who did the work you can refer back to those credits.
- The titles pretty much tell you exactly what you need to know. It’s nothing like a novel, no metaphors or dumb stuff. Scientist have a enough work as it is they don’t need to be reading everything to see if it applies to their field.
- Abstracts (and the journal article itself) are broken into 4 sections. Purpose – why they are doing the study. Methods – how they did it, if you haven’t done this stuff before the tests probably won’t make any sense. Results – what they found, a bunch of numbers giving the hard data on what actual happened. Conclusion/Interpretation – what it all means. Usually you can get by reading just the purpose and conclusion but the flaws lie in the methods/results section.
- Correlation does NOT imply causation. Many times they will find a connection between things (no point of publishing it if they didn't). Usually you’ll see P<0.05 which means that there’s a 95% chance that these two things are correlated. That 5% can be a big deal. Every good scientist knows that they are one variable away from discrediting their entire project. Saturated fat was proven to be dangerous, now studies are coming out saying it’s harmless. New information is always coming out, something can be gold today and dirt tomorrow.
- Flaws are common. Maybe not even flaws but just bad samples. A small sample size hurts the credibility of the study. A study on children might not be the same for adults. Having poor variables, like not having a control group, can affect the study. Just because they proved something doesn’t mean it’s truth. In fact bad variables could make the study prove the exact opposite of what the researcher concluded. Be very careful with how literal you take things. The best way to do things is if there are multiple studies with relatively the same results, there’s a good chance it’s real.
It’s extremely important for anyone doing any sort of personal training (coaching included) to keep up on current research. I’ll help by posting up a new journal post weekly on Mondays. If it gets popular maybe I’ll do it two days a week.
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What do you mean that most academic journals are gibberish? Most of them do use complex language, and they aren't geared towards everyday readers, but that doesn't necessarily make them gibberish.
ReplyDeleteI knew that was unclear and for whatever reason I just ignored it. I mostly meant the intro which is all credits and citation.
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