Reading Research Articles

A paper may undergo several reviews, revisions, and re-submissions before it is accepted or as the case may be rejected.

Cognitive biases creep into pretty much all our sense- and decision-making processes, excepting the simplest. A select—yet long—alphabetical list includes anchoring and adjustment, attribution asymmetry, choice-supportive bias, framing bias, groupthink, incremental decision making and escalating commitment, optimism or wishful thinking, premature termination of search for evidence, inertia, recency, repetition bias, role fulfillment, selective perception, selective search for evidence, source credibility bias, and underestimates of uncertainty and the illusion of control. Recognizing some of the foregoing biases will not arise when reading research articles, It stands to reason we should constantly be on our guard against subjectivity: here, there may be more art than science.

Like many others, Pascal felt that “Man is obviously made for thinking. Therein lies all his dignity and his merit; and his whole duty is to think as he ought” (Pascal, 1958). A contemporary of Descartes, Pascal is however best remembered for resisting rationalism, which he thought could not determine major truths: “The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know” (Pascal, 1958). Pascal and Descartes are reference points for two major attitudes to conscious representation of the world: although both saw reason as the primary source of knowledge, they disagreed profoundly over the competence of Man. (More often than not, the “truth” will lie somewhere between faith and radical doubt.)