good source of information you'll have to interpret the information that you find and with scientific information that often means reading a scientific paper scientific papers are the lifeblood of the scientific process now to the average person a scientific paper can be quite confusing and of course they would be these papers are not made for you they are made by professional smart people trying to communicate with each other but don't worry there is a place even the average person can start even me yes even you the least attractive hemsworth just just because it's true doesn't mean you have to say it to me every day reading a scientific paper while it's true that the average person will have a hard time engaging with a scientific paper there are ways to figure out what the paper is really saying and then i'm ready to get on twitter and yell at people about doing their own research online right hold on there sports fan step one where is the paper published as we said a screaming meatball's website won't be the best place for good information and that's specifically because it won't have peer review peer review is a professional process where before a paper is accepted by a scientific journal relevant experts are asked to check it out the reviewers look at the data the methods and the conclusions suggest revisions and then give the paper a go ahead step one is to do your best to check that your paper has been peer reviewed before proceeding onwards to the next steps i'm not sure this inflated yosemite sam even knows what peer review is step two read the abstract now scientists are very smart people but they can't know everything about everything and they don't have the time to that's why every scientific paper comes along with an abstract or summary of the paper's key questions and findings for other scientists and reviewers who may not be intimately familiar with the specifics of the work step two is to read the abstract yourself the key point should be in the last few sentences for example this paper found that dung beetles can navigate at night using the light from the milky way well how about that step NUMBER_TOKEN check for conflicts once we have a source of information and know generally what it says we want to check one more time for red flags if you scroll to the bottom of a good scientific paper it will show any conflicts of interest for the study authors a conflict of interest like having a study paid for by a large industry doesn't necessarily mean that the science is bad but it's definitely something to keep in mind good thing this dung beetle study wasn't paid for by big poop at this point if your peer-reviewed conflict-free abstract is written somewhat understandably who is talking right now you should feel pretty good about where doing your own research has gotten so we're done i can do my own research online almost but if you really want to be secure in the searching you've done and you're slightly more savvy there are a couple more checks you can do wow it almost seems like what people say they do on social media is nothing like actually doing research it's time for the lightning round is the sample size large enough is the sample representative are the experiments randomized are the experiments double-blinded is there a control group uh-oh what is it it seems that we have an emergency situation we've run across information from known misinformation peddlers hey i know what to do depending on the platform you should
NO_SEGMENT_TOKEN