Six Tips for Reporting Science Journals
By: Linda Topping Streitfeld

Here are six tips for reporters covering articles in scientific journals, courtesy of Dr. Rebecca Goldin. She’s the director of research at STATS.org and a math professor at George Mason University.

1.       Be skeptical of the press release, which never tells the whole story. It’s designed to get your attention, presents results in the best possible light, seldom puts the results in the context of other research and rarely offers concrete descriptions.

2.       Don’t stop reading at the abstract. It’s unlikely to answer such important questions as how subjects were recruited; what study design was used; how results were analyzed; and what weaknesses may lurk in the researchers’ conclusions.

3.       If you’re short of time, read the summary, the abstract and the conclusion. The latter is where peer-reviewed authors list the weaknesses of the study and how they dealt with them.

4.       Check pubmed.gov for key words to find other literature on the same topic and lead you to other researchers who can help you put the study into context.

5.       Remember the difference between correlation and causation. Just because increased height correlates directly with reading skills in children younger than 10 doesn’t mean that getting taller causes reading improvement. This gets harder when you’re looking at real data that seem intuitively correct.

6.       Understand the difference between absolute and relative risk. Absolute risk tells you the actual risk of a behavior or procedure. Relative risk tells you how the risk of one group compares with that of another. For example, women who take birth control pills have an absolute risk of developing a blood clot of about 1/10,000 per year. For women who do not take birth control pills, the absolute risk is about 1/15,000 per year. Women who take the pill have a 50 percent increased risk of blood clots compared with those who do not take the pill.

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