Introducing undergraduate students to scientific reports
Open accessAbstract
The question of how and when to introduce undergraduates to primary research articles is a perennial problem. We describe here a series of exercises undertaken with Level One students as introductory training towards the reading and presentation of scientific papers at Level Three and the writing up of final year research projects. In the first exercise, students consider the structure of a scientific report and read and evaluate a given research paper. Subsequently, students are asked to imagine themselves as scientific investigators interested in a specific problem. In tutor-led group discussion, they design an experiment to investigate the problem and then individually write a report based on provided data.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
There have been many strategies and supporting resources developed to help inexperienced readers engage with the primary literature.
“There have been many strategies and supporting resources developed to help inexperienced readers engage with the primary literature [6,8–14].”
From Perceptions of scientific research literature and strategies for reading papers depend on academic career stage (2017) · cites this paper as [12]
The citation lists haven’t been fetched yet
References 5 · Cited by 44
- Authors
- Willmott, C. J. R., Clark, R. P., & Harrison, T. M.
- Affiliations
- Department of Biochemistry
- University of Leicester (GB)
- Venue
- Bioscience Education
- Publisher
- Informa UK Limited
- Published
- 2003-01
- Volume
- 1
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 1-8
- ISSN
- 1479-7860 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2068177796
- Cited by
- 44
- References
- 5
- Citations by year
- 2023: 2 · 2022: 1 · 2021: 2 · 2019: 2 · 2017: 3 · 2016: 20 · 2015: 1 · 2014: 1 · 2013: 1 · 2012: 3
- FWCI
- 3.89
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Locations
- Bioscience Education (publishedVersion)
- Figshare (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Leicester Research Archive (University of Leicester) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Education › Science Education and Pedagogy
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History and Philosophy of Science › Academic Writing and Publishing
- Social Sciences › Library and Information Sciences › Library Science and Information Literacy
- Keywords
- scientific reports, undergraduate research training, scientific writing, research project writing, experimental design, group discussion
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
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