04-03-2020, 11:50 PM
No offense is intended here, but:
The deal is to use the right search engine, or at least the one that is most likely to give you what you are looking for, and knowing how to get information out of it. Not all search engines are created equally. As an example, I looked up the term 'allergic reaction' and 'cytokine storm' (without quotes) to see if anyone had reported increased incidence of patients who have normal every-day allergies who also have been victims of the cytokine storm that has been reported as a COVID-19 reaction. PubMed gave me 20 hits; scholar.google.com gave me over 7,000. None of the PubMed hits looked promising, and I didn't have time to go through the 7,000 others. Curiosity often sidetracks me.
Another deal is to know which sources are peer-reviewed, and which ones are not likely to be so. Researchgate.net sounds like it would be peer reviewed, but it isn't; it is just a depository for papers the authors want to allow others to see and/or get. I often use it to get scientific papers that are behind a paywall, which could cost either $5 or $150 (or more; some publishers are proud of their stuff), or things that are otherwise not easily available.
I have spent the last two weeks searching for scientific papers, both in the field that I studied in graduate school and the (totally different) one that I currently work in. Even with this work, I sometimes come across "papers" that haven't been critically examined, albeit they are supposedly peer reviewed. Not all peer reviewed sources are believable.
Welcome to science.
Diana
The deal is to use the right search engine, or at least the one that is most likely to give you what you are looking for, and knowing how to get information out of it. Not all search engines are created equally. As an example, I looked up the term 'allergic reaction' and 'cytokine storm' (without quotes) to see if anyone had reported increased incidence of patients who have normal every-day allergies who also have been victims of the cytokine storm that has been reported as a COVID-19 reaction. PubMed gave me 20 hits; scholar.google.com gave me over 7,000. None of the PubMed hits looked promising, and I didn't have time to go through the 7,000 others. Curiosity often sidetracks me.
Another deal is to know which sources are peer-reviewed, and which ones are not likely to be so. Researchgate.net sounds like it would be peer reviewed, but it isn't; it is just a depository for papers the authors want to allow others to see and/or get. I often use it to get scientific papers that are behind a paywall, which could cost either $5 or $150 (or more; some publishers are proud of their stuff), or things that are otherwise not easily available.
I have spent the last two weeks searching for scientific papers, both in the field that I studied in graduate school and the (totally different) one that I currently work in. Even with this work, I sometimes come across "papers" that haven't been critically examined, albeit they are supposedly peer reviewed. Not all peer reviewed sources are believable.
Welcome to science.
Diana