 If you want to verify a scientific study, you should get an undergraduate and then a graduate degree in the field of study. Read the literature, typically several dozen to several hundred articles relating to the study. Secure a grant or a self-fund your own study on the same topic. But unless it's your career, you don't have time for that. However, everyone should be able to read the study. So let's talk scientific papers. A peer-reviewed paper is the gold standard of research publication. To publish a peer-reviewed journal, the author writes a paper and submits it to a journal. The journal's editors prepare, or have the author prepare, a blinded copy that removes any identifying information, like the author's name or location. The blinded copy is submitted to a group of professionals working in a similar field. Most of the time the paper is sent back with requests for revisions and clarifications. The paper is only published after it passes the review process. This usually takes a year or more. Now in some cases, particularly fast developing fields, say research on an ongoing pandemic, authors will publish studies to the web. No one can stop them. However, if their research is legitimate, it should have all the features of a peer-reviewed paper and be in the process of being peer-reviewed. So what does that look like? So a scientific paper begins with a title. The title is based on the fact that tens of thousands of papers are published every year and no one could read more than a fraction of these. But you can title scan, and most titles can be understood by anyone with a reasonable education. Minus perhaps a few technical terms that would be known to specialists in the field. Now if the title indicates the paper is of interest, you then read the abstract. This is a synopsis of the main results. And this is a little bit more complicated. The abstract is geared for the trained non-specialists. And so here's where you'll start to see some of the more technical terms. Now you might think the next thing is the paper itself, but the next thing you really want to take a look at in a scientific paper is the authors. A legitimate scientific paper will also list the authors and their institutional affiliations. And the important thing about this is you can check their institutional affiliations. For example, they might be faculty at a major university or staff at a well-respected hospital. Or maybe their professional standing is based upon the accreditation of an organization they created by themselves for themselves. The other thing to check out is the bibliography. Remember we talked about the hundreds to thousands of papers on a similar subject. That's what we call the literature. The bibliography shows you what the authors examined prior to and during their research. It's not unusual for a one-page paper to have dozens of items in the bibliography. And finally we come to the article. Now the article itself is written for trained specialists. Again, you're probably talking about someone who has a graduate degree in the subject and who's been working on the subject of the paper for several years. And the problem is that unless you have a lot of technical knowledge in the field, it probably won't make much sense. But there are a few things to look for. And let's consider an epidemiological study. A legitimate epidemiological paper will give you three things. Detailed information about the research subjects. Detailed information about the data collection. And in-depth discussion of the limitations of the study. The population is a group on which the study was conducted. And things to look for. The number of research subjects. Generally speaking large studies are more reliable than small studies. But you should also look at the variability of the research subjects. So a study of 1,000 people is probably more reliable than a study of 20. But if those 1,000 people came from the same family, then the results of the study might not be as generally applicable. In this particular study we're looking at a base group of 53% of the entire population. The design will tell you how the study was conducted. And again things to look for. Precise definitions of outcomes and how the data was collected. So here the outcomes are defined on a published set of criteria documented by hospital admission or positive tests. And finally there will generally be some sort of discussion of the result. And in the discussion section the authors will describe some of the limitations of the study and possibly how they got around it. Often this section is a sneak peek at what their next paper will be about. Now let's take a look at one of the most notorious scientific papers in recent years which led to the anti-vaxxer movement. The Lancet is a peer reviewed well respected medical journal. And in 1998 they published a paper that suggested there might be a link between vaccines and autism. But if you take a look at the original paper in the Lancet a couple of things stand out. First the sample size was 12 children. This is a very small sample size for an epidemiological study. Also these children were all referred to a single pediatric gastroenterology unit. And so there was very limited variability in the test subjects. And finally the paper had no discussion of the limitations of the study. All of these things should have been red flags that cast doubt on the validity of the results. The study's results were questioned and within 18 months further studies cast doubt on the link. And this study included a larger sample of 498 children and a broader sample by being pulled from children registered with developmental disabilities. What's noteworthy is the first debunking of this misinformation came from scientists and in fact came from the original publication of the flawed report. In other words, scientists did the job they were supposed to do. It wasn't until five years later that investigative journalists published their own findings about the fraudulent report. So what does this mean? Well think of a scientist as a Wild West gunslinger. The fastest gun in the West was routinely challenged by those hoping to make their reputation. Similarly any established scientific belief is constantly challenged by scientists hoping to make their reputation. Now since scientists are human flawed papers and fraudulent results are published but they are quickly identified as bad research by other scientists.