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794 sats \ 6 replies \ @ama 28 Jan \ on: Are there any of you that read magazines? science
There are many scientific journals, for every scientific discipline you could think of. Nature is one of the multidisciplinary journals, being Science, PNAS, PLoS One, a few other.
For general culture, you can browse through some of those, but for more in depth learning about a certain topic, literature databases are available to perform searches on certain topics of interest. When doing serious research about a topic, one should perform a systematic review, to get a complete understanding of the field.
What is your stance towards Nature accepting ChatGPT as a co-author for scientific papers?
Regarding the articles themselves, within academic publishing there are different categories of papers. Research papers or articles are the main way in which researchers publish their original work. They are the primary source scientific information, and therefore they are very specific, in depth reports of facts and results of the research work, with all the details needed for other scientists to fully understand it and replicate it.
Another interesting type of papers are review articles, which contain a systematic review and summary of the current understanding on a certain subject at the time of writing. They are secondary sources of information, which are often easier to understand than original research papers, which are very specific and can some times be very complicated.
There are some journals which specialize in review articles on specific academic discipline, which might be an excellent resource. They are usually much better than popular science magazines or web sites, in which articles are normally written by journalists instead.
As an undergraduate biology student I loved Scientific American, which publishes (requested, not submitted) review articles by researchers who specialize on that particular discipline.
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Some might, hehe, of course, but in any case, papers can get very complicated, since they have to give al the details so that the whole research can be repeated by an independent research team. Review papers, on the other hand, don't need to be as detailed and complex, but they relay on references to original papers (primary sources).
For casual reading, as you stated on your original question, review articles should be appropriate, indeed. Their authors already made the systematic review, the filtering of data, facts, and results, and the summarizing and discussion of many research papers. Occasionally, you may find some details interesting enough for you to check the bibliographic references, get a copy of the original paper and dive into it.
Libraries, mainly in universities, subscribe to many scientific journals, and if you have access to them, you can get a copy of individual papers through them. And in some cases (see [PLOS](https://plos.org/, for example), the contents of the journals are of free access, since the authors pay for publishing.
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