A new study shows how sugar might feed the growth of cancer. A new study finds pizza is the most
addictive food in America. A major new study finding up to
90% of cancers are not caused by genetics. And a surprising new study out of Harvard today
that could change the way we think about dieting. A new study shows late night snacking...
Where do all these scientific studies come from? What do they actually look like?
We hear about them all the time, but rarely from the scientists themselves
Unfortunately,
these quick and dirty TV pieces and articles are often inaccurate and misleading
If only we could look at the studies directly and see for ourselves
Lucky for us,
this is the age of the Internet and this phenomenal trove of information is out there for anyone to find
If you know where to look and what to look for it is all just one click away
Meet Google Scholar. It's a search engine just like Google but specialized for academic work things like studies,
articles, books, and it gives you access to most of the resources used by professional scientists
Looks super simple, right? But the information you find here can be literally
life-changing. Let's say I'm interested in a certain disease. Maybe somebody in my family has
diabetes
Okay, so I'm going to search
And we get a list of all the scientific papers talking about diabetes
Now don't get intimidated. If you see words you don't understand, totally normal. Even professional scientists, happens all the time
I've been searching scientific literature for almost 20 years now, since I was in med school, and it still happens all the time
especially papers outside my field
lots of terms and techniques
I'm not familiar with, no big deal, I look it up or the paper itself often explains what the terms mean
So don't sweat it, it gets easier
You don't need a degree or formal scientific training to peruse this information and learn about your health
And why bother with Google Scholar in the first place? Why not just go straight to Google?
Well because of reliability. On Google you're gonna find everything on the Internet
But you're not gonna know whom to trust I could make a website tomorrow
saying the most outrageous things: tobacco doesn't cause cancer
vegetables are horrible for your health and
somebody looking at the website who didn't know any better wouldn't have a way to distinguish what's real and what's not because there's no oversight
on a regular website. Here, you're getting scholarly work. So there's gonna be many layers of quality control
over just regular Google hits. Now,
this search is too general. So you get too many hits
Over two and a half million papers talking about diabetes. So maybe you want to search for something more specific
Maybe you want to know what foods lower and what foods increase your odds of getting diabetes
So you type maybe "diabetes diet" and now we get a more restricted list of hits. Now,
you don't necessarily want to click the title because that often does not give you full access to the paper
You want to go for this this link on the right over here. That's always full text access
So here we are. This is the full paper
All the results, all the discussion by the authors. It's amazing that we get access to this information
so easily
for free basically
So you can go through, see what the authors did, see what they concluded
And you've got this little summary over here
the goals
the results and the conclusions that they drew
Now, what about the second hit? It doesn't have a full-text link and in fact what you see if you click the title
It only gives us the summary of the work and
Not the full text. So are we stranded? does this mean we can't look at the full work? not necessarily
That's where this other tool comes in this
nifty little website called Sci-hub. And what you're gonna do is you're just gonna copy this URL
right
onto this search box
Right there and click open and here we are a lot of times this works and it gives you access to the full text
All the discussion by the authors, all the results, etc
so by combining
Google Scholar and this Sci-hub tool
you end up getting full-text access to a lot a lot of the research out there
Let's see another example. Let's go back to our home page of Google Scholar
Let's say you saw some interesting headline or you heard some news on TV, something that caught your attention and you want to fact-check it.
Maybe you heard something about red meat and cancer. Okay, you want to check that on Google Scholar and
Here we are, all the studies that talk about red meat and cancer so you can go through
Maybe you look at the first half dozen or the first dozen and you get a rough idea of what the science is saying
So let's take a quick look at the first hit
Carcinogenicity of consumption of red meat and processed meat so you can go through this, see what the authors said
and
so on down the list. But Google Scholar is not just for medicine and biology
In fact, you can search any scientific topic on here
let's say you've heard something on the news about climate change and you want to get informed. So you search
climate change and
Almost three and a half million hits
Scientific papers on climate change. If you want to make the search a little more specific maybe add man-made
climate change and here are all the papers
Now you see it's gone down to less than half a million
You get the idea, as you narrow the search you get more and more specific hits. Or you can search for
natural disasters and the connection
we have the search here
All the papers that talk about climate change and natural disasters. You can see what the scientific consensus is
So, this is a great great tool to fact-check. You hear something about
nutrition in a blog or a YouTube video and normally you don't have a good way to distinguish what's
phenomenal information and what's just nonsense. One source says A, one source says B,
you're stuck. You either give up or you just trust whoever has the most degrees or whoever
appears most friendly to you. There's no way for you to clearly distinguish fact from fallacy
so that's where Google Scholar comes in. Even a quick search can give you a
pretty decent first-pass idea
of what scientists are saying about a topic that you're normally not gonna get from mainstream media cuz it just doesn't go deep enough
Of course
this is not gonna make you an expert overnight
but it's a great tool to fact-check some information and to protect yourself and be empowered. At the end of the day
you don't need a degree to learn more about your health and about medicine
You just need a bit of curiosity and access to great information