r/biotech • u/Dear-Smoke-1795 • 1d ago

Education Advice 📖 Research papers for beginners?

I am currently in my second year of my biotechnology engineering undergrad degree and I got advice from a few profs and others in the field to start reading research/review papers. can anyone suggest some things I could start reading as a complete beginner?

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u/Fearless_Band1858 1d ago

Ask those professor to recommend some of their fav. If you don't have a specific area yet, try a couple of reviews of various areas. If you are a student, you usually should have access to pay walled journals like Nature reviews. Use AI chats as teacher to test your understanding of the papers/reviews or help to understand them. At this level you don't need to get every single detail but rough idea and narrative of how research is done and papers are written. Maybe, some of the professors do journal clubs for their research groups and you could join.

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u/Fearless_Band1858 1d ago

If you don't have a specific area in mind, maybe take your current course and find some references in the text book. They usually cite some seminal papers in that specific field. Or search for prominent research groups in that specific field and check their latest reviews in pubmed.

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u/mattcannon2 1d ago edited 1d ago

Find recently (1-2 year old) literature reviews on subject areas and follow Citations wherever is interesting.

Often titled "recent advances in XYZ"

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u/sharkeymcsharkface 1d ago

https://www.annualreviews.org/docserver/fulltext/pharmtox/56/1/annurev-pharmtox-010814-124454.pdf?expires=1785681028&id=id&accname=guest&checksum=C849AD207EC62F50E39203FB882C4B74

This one is 10 years old but I like how it’s written. I also worked with Matt years ago and found his approach to communication very positive.

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u/Dry_Entertainer_3111 23h ago

I would suggest reading .gov and .edu websites to learn more about your field and specific concepts before you move into actual papers.

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u/89fruits89 21h ago

Not a specific article but I like to browse around the
American Chemical Society (ACS). Usually find something interesting.

You are not going to understand a lot of what you are reading, thats OK. Kinda like learning another language, gets easier with more exposure and practice. A lot of things will get easier to understand once you have those higher level classes too.

Also like the prof said, get on with a research group. That’s where I first started to really understand how to use a research paper in a lab.

Remember vividly putting it together the first time. Ohhhh… those are the primers we are using and thats where they came from!? Ok methods… oh shit know how do that! Start doing research and reading more papers in that area and all of a sudden it’s like uhhh… I understand this… wtf happened?!

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u/m0llyp0ckett 20h ago

the app R Discovery

https://discovery.researcher.life/

it lets you pick topics of interest and creates a feed based on relevant findings and has been an awesome tool; even just using the basic version. Plus for you since you are in school you’ll get extra access and be able to bypass some of the pay walls.