The coronavirus pandemic now presents an extra challenge: there are far more papers than anyone could ever read. If you use a tool like Google Scholar， you may be able to zero in on some of the papers that are already getting cited by other scientists. They can provide the outlines of the past few months of scientific history – the isolation of the coronavirus， for example， the sequencing of its genome， the discovery that it spreads quickly from person to person even before symptoms emerge. Papers like these will be cited by generations of scientists yet to be born.
Most won't， though. When you read through a scientific paper， it's important to maintain a healthy scepticism. The ongoing flood of papers that have yet to be peer-reviewed – known as preprints – includes a lot of weak research and misleading claims. Some are withdrawn by the authors. Many will never make it into a journal. But some of them are earning sensational headlines before burning out in obscurity.
When you read a scientific paper， try to think about it the way scientists do. Ask some basic questions to judge its merit. Is it based on a few patients or thousands？ Is it mixing up correlation and causation？ Do the authors actually present the evidence required to come to their conclusions？
Science has always travelled down a bumpy road. Now it is in an extraordinary rush， with the world looking for every new preprint and peer-reviewed paper in the hope that some clue will emerge that helps save millions of lives.
Yet our current plight does not change the nature of the scientific paper. It's never a revelation of absolute truth. At best， it's a status report on our best understanding of nature's mysteries.
最近，很多人生平第一次阅读科学论文，希望弄懂这场冠状病毒大流行病。如果你也是其中一位，那么你需要知道科学论文是一种特殊文体，可能需要适应一下。
当17世纪的自然哲学家向期刊投稿时，期刊编辑决定这些文章是否值得发表。但经过200年的科学进步，维多利亚时期的科学家不可能再是所有领域的专家。期刊编辑会把论文寄给外部专家，这些人对某一研究分支了如指掌，胜过大多数科学家。