Journal Articles are Confusing!

The thing I find most confusing about journal articles is definitely the complicated jargon that authors use. Instead of reading and understanding the experiment and trying to interpret results on my own, I often find myself on Wikipedia trying to find out what some of their fancy language means.

When I understand the articles, my next biggest problem is length. I sometimes think the authors include way too much detail that distracts readers from the significance of their study and why it is relevant in the field today.

A third difficulty I have had with journal articles is interpreting the statistics they have provided. Sometimes it seems that if the results the experimenters obtained were not statistically significant, they would not have included those results in their study. Other times, it seems like conclusions that researchers draw from their results are a bit of stretch.

Synapse: Animations are easier to understand!

Finally, one last thing I find confusing about journal articles are their diagrams/figures. Unlike textbook pictures, these diagrams are almost always real images (instead of animations) that to a reader like me (not an expert in their field of study) are really confusing. The captions sometimes make it easier to follow, but authors often use their own abbreviations (ie. for new proteins) to describe their images that just aren’t that clear. Although I think including an animation might not be that scientifically professional and could potentially oversimplify findings, I think readers might be able to reach a higher level of understanding.