Chris Bolhuis: It's Arlen and it's really, so this is really weird. So Jenny and I went to school together in the seventh grade. She turns around cuz we always sat in alphabetical order and her last name was right before mine. So she was always right in front of me and she turned around [00:01:00] and she's like, crystal heis. What's your middle name? And I'm like, oh, you will never guess right out of her mouth. She says, Hmm, is it Arlan? And like, I, I was blown away. she guessed it right off the bat. First

Dr. Jesse Reimink: didn't know that before.

Chris Bolhuis: crazy. She did not know that before. And I'm like, how? How? And it's on her side of the family.

A bunch of guys are, that's their first name, Arlen.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: I mean, it was meant to be. I'd never heard that story before. Wow.

Chris Bolhuis: See you learned [00:01:30] something

Dr. Jesse Reimink: You learn something new every day with a podcast with Chris Boisman, a Christopher Arlen Bois. Wow. That's a, that's a great one. I'm happy I know that. Now

Chris Bolhuis: right. Jenny's pretty quick,

Dr. Jesse Reimink: she is. She's a quick one. Um,

Chris Bolhuis: All right.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Speaking of quick,

are we doing today?

Chris Bolhuis: Well, I don't know how quick this is gonna be, but I'm really interested in this. I've been looking forward to it all day long because I really don't know where this conversation's gonna go today. I have a rough idea as to how it's gonna go, but honestly though you [00:02:00] came up with this idea. What we're talking about is, let me just cut to the chase. We're talking about how to read a scientific paper and , you threw this out a while back and I thought, Hmm, what an interesting. idea, first of all, and then as the more I thought about it, because I wasn't right, I wasn't sold right away on it,

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, and to just refresh, we like kind of pitch each other on topic ideas, right? And sometimes it's easy. You pitch me stream Meanders the other day, one of our recent episodes and I was like, oh yeah, done. Okay, easy. We can, we can crank that. That's a great topic. Let's do [00:02:30] it.

Sometimes it's not as smooth as that, let's say. And we fight. We maybe break up every once in a while,

Chris Bolhuis: Yeah. Yeah, we've had a few of those, but yeah. Um, and so I wasn't sold on it right away, but then I thought about it and I'm thinking, wait a minute. reading a scientific paper is, is tough. Stuff like You threw me a paper today or yesterday, I don't remember, a couple days ago, and it ties into what we just got done talking about last episode with stream meanders because this one is called the impact of [00:03:00] Vegetation on Meandering Rivers. and so we thought, well, alright, we'll tie these two in together. And that's kind of what we're gonna do today is you're gonna really talk about how you read a scientific paper but we're gonna also talk about this article and kind of weave the contents of the article into this whole discussion as well.

At least best we can, right?

That's the idea.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: so let me, maybe if you allow me, Chris, I can kind of do the pitch a little bit here, give you listener. The pitch that I gave Chris is, well, there's really two things here that I [00:03:30] want to kind of get the point across and why I think this is important.

First of all, I think it, it can be pretty intimidating picking up a scientific paper and trying to read it, but it really should not be good papers should not be intimidating to read. there's terminology that's obviously confusing. There's jargon that. People won't know that. You just have to learn.

You have to spend a career learning it. But the ideas and the concepts should be tractable for most people, so it should not be intimidating. That's the first thing. And the second thing is that I think it's a [00:04:00] really valuable skillset. Like you tend to, people tend to think that published work is right. Then a bunch of people also think published work is just completely wrong and neither is true. Right? Like there is published work. That's correct. There's published work that's been proven to be incorrect and there's published work that we don't really know the jury's still out on, and I think kind of being able to plug into that is really valuable.

For those of you who are listening to this are. Interest in the geosciences, you probably get geoscience news articles and you read those things. There's [00:04:30] always a paper behind that. And actually picking up and reading the paper is a really valuable thing to do, although it's intimidating. So see above point number one, it shouldn't be intimidating.

So like, just kind of understanding the process I think a valuable thing. And this is something we work through with the undergrads in my research lab and the grad students when they're, especially early on in their graduate school careers, it's a learned skill.

Chris Bolhuis: So what does that look like? Is that a structured kind of thing? Is it like a, a, a mini class or is this just a, a few meetings where you talk about this kind of thing?

Dr. Jesse Reimink: [00:05:00] Yeah, we kind of tend to take it, it's like many things, you know, it's easier to learn by doing and so we tend to take as a research group, take a paper or two or take, you know, four throughout a semester or six throughout a semester and read them together and then discuss them. And someone will kind of

take the

Chris Bolhuis: of like a journal club

Dr. Jesse Reimink: E Exactly. It's a small journal club where. in journal clubs, it can be a little bit intimidating. Like there are high level journal clubs. When I have a journal club, quote unquote with my professor colleagues around a beer. We don't talk about how to read the paper, we just talk [00:05:30] about the science ideas. Right.

But this is a little bit more, you know, half how to read the paper, half the science in the paper, or the ideas in the paper. Um, so So, so that's the pitch for like, why this is an important thing for everybody, I think to at least break down that barrier between sort of you and reading science.

Chris Bolhuis: But why can't, then our listeners just read a summation that somebody else did, like a Maya Haas who we interviewed much earlier. She reads the articles or [00:06:00] she's spends time with the scientists that did the research and then writes an article for a National Geographic, like, why is that

Dr. Jesse Reimink: It's a great question, Chris. I think my take on this, and there are people who do a really good job, like Maha is an excellent science writer and science communicator. There are other ones that are not that great and I think those types of articles, like when you're writing a popular science article that's based on a research paper, typically.

[00:06:30] What's interesting and what gets clicks and what people are interested in is the new idea, and people are less interested in like the counterpoints to the new idea or like the reasons it might be wrong or it might not be quite the full story, like that's less interesting and so that's not focused on as much.

And so reading things critically, Is an important part of this as well, and, you know, sometimes that happens, well, often it happens, but it's like a couple lines at the end of several paragraphs of an article, that are [00:07:00] like, you know, paper discovered, uh, that plate tectonics started 3.8 billion years ago.

And then there'll be. 10 paragraphs on that, and then a couple lines at the bottom that say, this is not totally accepted by the community. So-and-so says that this might not be right because of this reasons. And that's, that's kind of it. But you have to like go and read the paper to get the full richness of, what they did probably.

So, Both are are great. Um, but I think going to the primary source is, is interesting sometimes

Chris Bolhuis: So how do you, how [00:07:30] do you see this happening then in most, in most situations? do you think that somebody reads a paper in a popular, you know, journal or popular magazine or whatever, right? And then they're like, oh, I, I think I need to go read this paper. how do you think this goes?

Usually,

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, it's a good question. And there there's different types of papers out there. In the paper we read the impact of vegetation on Meandering Rivers. This is written by a colleague friend of mine, Alessandro Opi, who, is a very good writer and a sedimentologist. So this is outside of my field as well, but this is a review paper.

[00:08:00] So this is something that kind of reviews the last maybe five years to decade of research on. Vegetation and meandering rivers, which is kind of a new field. And so that is a type of a paper which more people will read a review paper. if I study the details of some weird rock terrain up in Northern Canada that not many people really care about, very few people are gonna read that paper necessarily.

So there's, published papers and there's published papers. There's like different categories of them. [00:08:30] So, What I think I don't know, Chris, I guess maybe I'd flip that around. Like when do you read papers? Cuz you've read a lot of papers in your day when do you find yourself reading papers

most frequently? Or when do you not

read them too?

Chris Bolhuis: okay. Good question. Uh, so I'll answer the first thing first. when do I find myself reading papers? When I am trying to get ready for something or trying to wrap my mind around something? that's kind of the way I am, and you know this about me when I write scripts for [00:09:00] this show and so on.

So I'll just, I'll end up in a rabbit hole and I'll spend time that I really don't need to spend. But then again, I have this like, Need to understand something at a really deep level before I, I feel like I can communicate that to people. And so I will read something like that then I'll go to the original paper quite often if I, if I don't feel satisfied, or quite often when you read these summations, you know, like you said, maybe they're not well written or [00:09:30] they're just, there are gaps, there are holes and.

Sometimes you don't understand it and so I have to go to the original work to, to wrap my mind around it.

it happens all the time actually, especially doing this podcast. I find myself doing this all the

Dr. Jesse Reimink: that's where I see this fitting in To you, the listener's life is scratching that itch, right? Like you gotta, you really wanna understand stuff. And we've had people email us, so many of you have emailed us and said, Hey, I read this paper, or Hey, I saw this article about this paper and I [00:10:00] read it, and you know what's going on.

And so people are reading papers more than I, you know, imagine for me, it's my job, like it is my job to read papers. I also find myself reading papers a lot, Chris, when I'm exploring. Other areas like when I'm going to New Hampshire or I was just looking at the Geology around the Washington DC cuz I'm going down there, I'm gonna do a little stop and check out some rocks.

I was reading papers from like 1979 where they were mapping, you know, the area and looking at the original rock descriptions just this morning. But that's like a little bit [00:10:30] more for, fun and not necessarily for work. Right? And so I end up. doing this more than, than I would have otherwise just for work.

Um,

And I'd imagine a lot of people are kind of the same way. So you made a really good point though, that I just want to, I want to emphasize two things right out of the gate here. The first thing is that papers, although many of them are behind paywalls, you can always find a way to get them. There's this website called Research Gate where you can usually download PDFs.

You can always email the [00:11:00] authors, and the vast majority of people, if they're still active and working, have PDFs and they're more than happy to send them to people. When people

email me, I. I always forward a PDF to anybody who emails me. Professor Remick, I'd like this paper. I always forward it bar

Chris Bolhuis: good to know. Yeah,

that's really good to

Dr. Jesse Reimink: so you can get them, even if they're behind a paywall,

main

Chris Bolhuis: Okay. What, what was your second question? I think I only answered the first one. What was the second part of that?

Dr. Jesse Reimink: more point, point number two that I was just about to make and then I'll ask you the second part of the question because I think it [00:11:30] might pertain, um, Papers, I would say break apart into two categories. Well, really four categories along two axes, like rows and columns.

Here, there is good science and there is, I would say, not as good science. And then there is good writing. And not as good writing. And so you can have a paper and I think we just read one that's great science and great writing. And you can have a paper that's great science and bad writing and you can have one that's bad science and bad writing and you can have bad science and great writing.

I'll leave it [00:12:00] at that and we'll come back to this point probably. But my question for you, Chris, was when do you not read a paper? Like when do you sue and say, ah, I'm not gonna

read that.

Chris Bolhuis: Yeah. if it reads like a foreign language,

I'm done. that's what it is for me. If the vocabulary is just . Too far out of my realm. I can't wade through it. A lot of the, you see, these papers are not short. You know, this usually they're lengthy, they're in depth. And even the, you know, the one that we read here on Meandering Rivers, it was heavy.

It was, I find myself, you know, [00:12:30] rereading a lot of parts of it, sometimes multiple times. So it takes a long time to get through it. So, I'll give up on a paper if it is just too heavy, you know, I, I have a, you know, a deep background in Geology, and these things are so niche sometimes that it's so far beyond me that I, I'm like, oh.

Forget it.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah. Yeah. So I would agree. I mean, I, I do that too all the time, and I think that's why I kinda wanted to bring this up is if you, Chris Bull Heiss cannot plug into the [00:13:00] nomenclature or the jargon in a paper, That's a poorly written paper. Even though the science may be great, that's a poorly written paper.

And so this is the one thing that I really belabor with, you know, the undergrads and grad students in my research group, they're probably sick of me saying this, is that you can't get intimidated by this thing If you can't get it. You sitting in this room, you're all smart people, you're very interested.

I care more about you being interested than being smart, but like you're clearly interested. If you can't read it, it's the paper's fault or the writer's fault, not your fault.[00:13:30] and it takes effort. Like sometimes it takes effort. I have reread in this paper, reread this is not my field. It took a while for me to plug into it, and I know Ali, he's a very good writer, but he does write at a fairly high level.

And it, I had to read many paragraphs over again to kind of really understand exactly what was, uh, what was going on. That's natural. So like for me, I kind of belabor that point that

that's natural.

Chris Bolhuis: All right. Well, job, I'm gonna move this along then. Let's, let's go ahead, Jesse. Let's start with how do you read a scientific paper? What do you [00:14:00] tell your graduate students?

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, I, I, so I'm gonna answer this with two keys or two strategies that I don't really follow anymore, and I'll be curious on. On how you did this, Chris, I'd be curious on like for instance, this paper, how did you start it out? But really what I say is try and get a summary first. And the summary comes from reading the abstract.

And you don't have to really understand every word in the abstract. you just read the abstract, it'll give you an overview. That's the point of it. And then figures. So. [00:14:30] Abstract figures, conclusions, and I like to work through the figures, read the text on the figures, and read the captions. And basically what I tell people to do is get an overview.

Get a summary, and try and figure out where. You can most easily plug into the paper and where you're gonna need to spend more time to understand it. And so if you can look at the data sets and you think, okay, I understand kind of the main point of that data, rich figure. Good. Okay. If there's a schematic that I don't [00:15:00] quite get, then you need to maybe dive into that part of the paper where they reference that figure first.

I'm a really visual person, and so. I use the figures as like entry points into the paper, and then, uh, then part two of that. So get an overview, reading the abstract. Look at the figures and the captions. Read the conclusions. Then you'll have like this high level overview

Chris Bolhuis: Yeah, that's what I did. And what I always do, I read the abstract and I get an idea as to what's going on, and then I go right to the [00:15:30] diagrams, figures, pictures, and their explanations, and I study those. And I did that quite a bit with this paper.

some of the diagrams were very interesting and so I, I spend a lot of, yeah. And I wanna talk about these here. And by the way, we're gonna go ahead and link, can we do that? Can we link this in the show notes then? Okay. So after I got a, a handle on the, the diagrams and graphs and data, the images.

Then I went straight to the conclusion And then you go back. And then what I find [00:16:00] myself doing is as I go back and I start the article and, and work my way from beginning to end, I'll find myself being able to skip sections of it then because, I don't know, my mind is constantly like, I guess the, curating the information I'm taking in. And so I'll skip a section of it and I'll, I'll hop to the next one. So that was my approach. That's usually the way I

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, you know, my, my second thing I tell, especially undergrads and, and, early graduate students is, you know, usually don't worry about the methods for the first part. [00:16:30] Like there are parts of the paper you don't really need to care about. For most papers, Unless it's super, super close to your field and you need to understand literally every word in that paper, the methods don't really matter too much. It's really the intro regional Geology kind of background discussion, and then the discussion and conclusion.

So you kind of work. Sort of a reverse sandwich. You eat from the top and the bottom at the same time in this paper till you hit the middle section. The middle section is kind of the meatiest and usually the most in the weeds. Usually [00:17:00] you might abandon the middle part of the sandwich, so,

Chris Bolhuis: Um, interesting too. One other thing that I wanna bring up when I'm reading this is, um, I always go to the date, uh, when was this

published, because I, I tend to avoid things that are older. a lot has happened in the last two decades. And so if I come across something that's older than that, I'm, I'm probably not gonna read it.

I'll find something else. And I don't know, is that good or bad? Because that might offend some people, you know,

Dr. Jesse Reimink: I think, uh, it's an interesting question. Is it good or bad? [00:17:30] I think that it's, hmm, I think it's totally reasonable. I think that you have a deep appreciation for history and Geology, and so I think you would get a lot out of reading the older papers and understanding the history of geological ideas, but that would probably take.

not reading one paper, you'd probably wanna read five papers from 1955 to 2000 and that kind of showed you the history of the ideas of, of the impact of [00:18:00] vegetation on meandering streams or something like that. You know, there are 216 references in this paper and I don't know what the oldest one is, but I bet it's probably pretty old.

you know, going back and reading. The first person who thought about Mandarin streams in the science of Mandering streams, I bet would be super interesting. You know, not

necessarily super useful, but

Chris Bolhuis: yeah, well,

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Interesting.

Chris Bolhuis: I bet it would. you're right. But my problem would be if I don't have a deep background on that particular topic, what do you take as [00:18:30] truth and what has evolved and changed over time? And I'd have a hard time separating that out,

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, that's a totally, totally fair point. And so most recent equals most relevant usually. I, I think that's, that's probably pretty true. Um, not always most accurate though, because a lot of these things will change and science

is an evolving state and, uh, you know, it'll continue to change, right.

And

Chris Bolhuis: that's right.

And that's, a. Yeah, it's another important, part for me too, because as you are so apt and [00:19:00] quick to point out how old I am, you know, like it's, it's re it's, it's really important for me though to, to really stay current. so maybe, maybe that's why I react that way to older publications.

So, I don't know.

Anyway. Hey, let's talk a little bit about this article

then, or.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah. I want to kind of turn this around a little bit on you, Chris, a minute, and say, if you were telling your class about this paper tomorrow, your Geology class, like what would you [00:19:30] tell them? what would be your 15 minute, summary for the, for the kids?

Like, uh, cuz there's cool, there's amazingly cool stuff and I'm interested in what you pulled out as super cool, aspects to this.

Chris Bolhuis: So the first thing that I found really interesting is, and this may sound, like a, a no-brainer, like how could you not have thought about this? But you talk about meandering rivers and the impact that vegetation has on them. And then you go back to a time when there was no vegetation on [00:20:00] earth.

You go back to, you know, the cambri and, and on forward. I mean, there was a lot of time when. Our planet looked very different than it does today and so like that was an interesting thought to me that this process of, rivers and meanders and the physics behind it went on a very, very long time without vegetation,

Dr. Jesse Reimink: totally. Me too. I mean,

listen man.

Chris Bolhuis: thing that I thought was cool.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: I'm not a sedimentologist. I studied the early earth. This thought had not really ever crossed my mind until [00:20:30] I started talking to Ali about his science and studying, unvegetated Rivers. I was sort of like, okay, dude. I mean, why are we studying like modern rivers in the desert?

And he's like, well, think about it, man. Like 500 million years ago there were no plants on earth. So the rocks you look at, you see some old sediments. That's the equivalent morphology of, rivers back then. Oh wow. That's amazing. And so, Chris, I, let me make one point here cuz I think this really nicely links a few episodes we're doing here in kind of a, a stream series, [00:21:00] if you will.

It's not a long series, but we talked about Mandering streams we're going to talk about levies. And one thing that I really found interesting here is that, This image, it's figure four. For those of you who actually are gonna, click on this paper and dive into it based on the recommendations.

Figure four shows that, when there were not plants around anchoring the bed streams, there's a lot more levies. Like these dams broke their, their natural levies a lot more frequently. And so I kind of found that really interesting that this. Kind of bridged, several of our topics that we're having in [00:21:30] the streams a little

bit more.

which

was kind of cool. oh, and Chris, this was a great word. The greening of the continents. I love that phrase that, that they used

to describe plants coming onto the scene. Like the greening of the continents is such a great, uh, verb.

Chris Bolhuis: yeah. Another takeaway actually was the, the next figure in this, which is really, it's, it's a picture showing three different river settings. One is with no vegetation, a desert kind of setting, [00:22:00] and then you have the Humboldt River. Which is this kind of in between thing. And then you have one that, looks like a tropical rainforest, you know, it's really heavily vegetated.

and then you see these characteristic shapes that the rivers take on in each of these settings. So I spent a lot of time looking at that. I found it to be fascinating. so that was be the second thing that I would talk about with

Dr. Jesse Reimink: So, what was kind of a most interesting takeaway of the difference between unvegetated and vegetated [00:22:30] meandering streams streams in the desert and manuring streams in a forest.

what was the most interesting takeaway do you think?

Chris Bolhuis: so for me it was the seniority of the manders.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Okay, just explain. Explain the term tensity a minute.

Chris Bolhuis: alright, let's see. So how do you explain continuity? The how loopy the bends are?

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Oh, good. Per, that's great. How loopy the, I love that. No, that hits it perfectly. Totally. How loopy the bins are. I like that. where [00:23:00] the vegetated, the one with

trees all around has much loopier.

Chris Bolhuis: Hold on, hold on. Oh, okay. You sold it. All right. So you, you said it, I was just gonna say, that'd be a good question for the listeners. What do you think,

right.

Which ones are gonna have loopier bends? Which ones are more sinuous? the vegetated ones or the non vegetated ones. And to me, it was surprising actually

that the vegetated, the greener earth has more seniority,

more Lupe,

Dr. Jesse Reimink: And therefore more [00:23:30] likely to create oxbow lakes, like more likely to create that big, full horseshoe, whereas an Unvegetated river flowing through a desert or think of, I always kind of think of, a glacial. Stream coming outta the mountains and hitting the valley floor. And then you get this big out wash plane where there's trees way on the edges of the flood, bank, but in the middle it's just gravel.

That's the stream I kind of always envision, that stream just kind of winds back and forth. It never makes these big, big loops horseshoes that [00:24:00] get cut off again. I found that really interesting that that

Chris Bolhuis: Yeah, they have those. In our last episode we talked about the, the radius of the curvature. You know, and with non vegetated rivers, they have a much, much longer, radius for their curvature.

and then the other thing too, a lot hitting, hitting with the same thing in terms of, you know, the other takeaway is that, and I think this one is more intuitive by a lot, is

that non-vegetarian rivers migrate faster.

You know, that makes sense to me.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: It [00:24:30] does. I, I agree. It does make sense to me as well, that fact in and of itself, but to me, combined with the fact that vegetated rivers have this more sinuous nature, these bigger horseshoe bends, those two kind of feel a little counterintuitive. I. That I would've expected that the one with the bigger horseshoes would be migrating faster.

Meaning the horseshoe is cutting outwards faster. But that's kind of the inverse is true. So that, that was the aspect that was a little bit counterintuitive

about that for me. [00:25:00] a really interesting point about the river that has trees around it or that has vegetation is that, It's mostly about the mud.

The mud gets caught and held by the tree roots and the mud actually prevents this bank instability. Like putting mud in between sand grids helps stabilize the slopes. That was kind of a, an interesting point that I had

never really thought about before. Uh, not being a sedimentologist and being somebody who's interested in magmas and igneous rocks.[00:25:30]

Chris Bolhuis: That's right. Uh, I, I, yeah, I agree. okay, well, let me flip this back to you then. are some things that you took away that you want to talk about that I haven't already hit?

Dr. Jesse Reimink: well the levy thing was kind of an interesting one for me, and I, we'll probably come back to this a bit in our levy episode about the, the utility of levies, coming up soon. that was kind of an interesting one. I think one thing that really made a lot of sense to me is that, the repercussions of civilization that we're getting rid of a lot [00:26:00] of the trees around meandering streams.

And so using the analogy of basically using Unvegetated Rivers as a way to study some future streams where we've deforested areas or we're building cities around meandering streams drawing. That analogy was a really powerful one that made a lot of sense to me, and in my physical Geology intro class, I have a lot of civil engineers and mining engineers in there. So that point would be well received. I think that would help me sell, you know, streams [00:26:30] to the, the class of 200 out of like

220 students. Yeah. The importance right to the, to the modern civilization.

like 220 students, I think probably 180 of them are in the, the engineering program in some way, shape or

form. So I tend to.

Chris Bolhuis: interesting crowd.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, I, I cater a bit to that, uh, population just with things like this, tidbits like that. So this is,

so that was something I would totally talk about, in this

class.

Chris Bolhuis: a little bit off topic though, with that class. I [00:27:00] bet the mass wasting unit would be a fun one to get after because that's really what they deal with. where to put the roads and things like this. Right. And slope stability and, you're trying to hem in a river, you know,

Dr. Jesse Reimink: what else, Chris? I mean, how else I guess, put this box, put this paper into, I. Two categories for me, like how interesting was it and how well written was it?

Chris Bolhuis: so there is a figure, figure four, you just referred to it, and did you say this was your, one of your favorite figures

Dr. Jesse Reimink: [00:27:30] Yeah. The

one.

with the two streams. Barren and vegetated on either side. The schematic.

Chris Bolhuis: I really appreciate that aspect of it. But I found this particular figure, though, to be difficult for me because I don't know what Krevas play complexes are.

You know, it's referred to, I don't,

I have no idea what that is. Uh, un bio sediment. I, I know what that is, but, it's, it's a, it's a mouthful of a word. actually, what I had to do with this figure then is go right to the text where [00:28:00] it was discussed in here.

So,

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Chris that brings it full circle, like really back to how to read a paper. That is one of the keys is you look at a figure, the figure is your entry point into the paper. And so doing exactly as you did is just a great way. Like you say, okay, I don't quite understand this figure.

I'm gonna go to the text. Because that's where it explains it more. And if you look at it and you think, oh, I totally get this figure, I understand everything on here, maybe you don't need to go to the text. that surrounds that particular figure. [00:28:30] So that's a great way to do it.

And I do this all the time. I did the same thing with this thing cuz I don't know what a

krevas display levy broach is either. Right?

So,

Chris Bolhuis: yeah.

Okay. yeah, the, I guess the other thing too, in writing a good paper, right? You talked about good papers and bad papers and so on. To me, the figures. they're a centerpiece of the paper, the diagrams and graphs and things like that. And I think that they really need to be explained in detail in the [00:29:00] text, and sometimes it's not.

It's like it's unrelated almost. And it's

very frustrating for me when I see that. So.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: I agree completely. And there are a lot of really well-written papers out there in the geoscience world. There are an equal number, if not more. Of poorly written papers, and I'm a bit of a elitist when it comes to figures.

I am extremely hard on figures and figures. Students make papers I'm on. I am a big [00:29:30] believer in figures and making figures that really tie deeply into the main science concepts and get the point across, even if the figures are kind of complicated and dense. a beautiful figure. Will

save you pages of text. It writes itself. And so, and this is an interesting point, this is the way I write papers now too, is I make the figures first. I'll make the 10 figures and then I'll write around those because that's how much I believe that the figures are intimately tied. And actually a side point, I'm really excited because there's a few journals [00:30:00] right now that are allowing what I'd call active figures, meaning like gifts or little short videos and things because we all look at PDFs like nobody buys the print journal anymore.

So they're allowing videos to be embedded into these PDF figures, which will be really, really great and kind of transform how papers are made.

I think a little bit,

Chris Bolhuis: a game changer

Dr. Jesse Reimink: totally game changer, right? Like, imagine that this schematic was like gide, like we have on our Camp Geo. we make some really cool gifts for our Camp [00:30:30] Geo conversational textbook.

That's the first link in your show notes if you wanna see it. But we have some cool gifts on there and it's

a, gifts are super powerful educational

Chris Bolhuis: Yeah. they they really are.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: um,

Chris Bolhuis: Okay. Well, I wanna cut to the chase here then, Jesse. Uh, go ahead and give us your doctor perspective here. What is the main takeaway then, of this paper?

Dr. Jesse Reimink: I think the main takeaway And this is speaking from an igneous pathologist reading a sedimentology pa, a sedimentology paper here. Uh uh, to me the main takeaway, and this will [00:31:00] be different, everybody who reads this paper will have a different takeaway, but my main takeaway is that there are dramatic differences between unvegetated and vegetated streams, and those are really important.

When we look both in my field of research, the early earth and forward looking, understanding how society interacts with the natural world, this paper really drove that point home that we need to understand this difference for both of those reasons. and I think From the science reading, reading a science paper, kind of the theme of this [00:31:30] episode. I think this paper did a really, really good job of the summary and future directions part, which should always be a part of any paper. Like any paper should have at least a paragraph or two on where to go next, like what the future looks like in this field.

And this paper did a really good job of that. I thought it had some, pretty interesting and thought provoking. Future directions and summary aspects to it. So I really

like that part about the writing in here.

Chris Bolhuis: Okay. I agree. [00:32:00] 100% with your takeaway. I think for me, my mind kept coming back to the, alright, what's the human impact then on rivers? And, and I think that's why this is important, that's why this kind of research is important. Um, we are intertwined with rivers we need to know about how the actions that we impose upon rivers how are the rivers gonna respond to that? So, yeah,

Dr. Jesse Reimink: So I'll be interested in, in getting feedback from, you know, listener if you have read a paper, if you like reading papers. If you don't give us some feedback.

[00:32:30] I would appreciate hearing your thoughts on this. and like I said before, feel free to reach out to authors. If you find a paper you're interested in, there's always an email address linked in a paper. Just ping 'em. Almost everybody who's active will get back to you and they'll actually be very excited that you're interested in their paper.

That's,

kind of what I,

Chris Bolhuis: that is not something Yeah, that's, that's not very intuitive, I think because, we just think, oh, I'm gonna, who am I, I'm gonna send an email to somebody that, that, you know, is PhD that published a paper. [00:33:00] They're gonna be like, uh, who's this person? You know, forget it, more of an annoyance.

And

you're saying that's not the

Dr. Jesse Reimink: I can guarantee you that is not the case. We get very few emails like that, and the ones that do come in are always appreciated and make you feel

like people care about what you're doing. And so that's always a nice feeling. We get very little congratulations.

In our job, we get a lot of rejection and not that much. Congratulations, so it's always nice to

have that.

Chris Bolhuis: Fair enough. Fair enough.

Uh,

Dr. Jesse Reimink: I hope this was a useful, uh, useful episode here.

Chris Bolhuis: I think [00:33:30] so. I liked it. Yeah.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: That's a wrap. Hey, if you want to learn more about us, follow us, subscribe, see all of our past episodes. You can go to planet geo cast.com.

You can also support us there. We really appreciate all the support we have received from you, the listener. and keep sending that our way. If you. Do us a favor. You can follow and subscribe and leave a review in a rating. That is really powerful for the algorithm and it helps other people discover Planet Geo.

The last thing Chris, We are putting together this conversational textbook for the geosciences. We're calling it Camp [00:34:00] Geo. It's pretty sweet, I must say. We're updating the interface probably as we speak when this episode launches. And, uh, it, it's looking pretty good. Now, we got a lot of content up there.

If you want to get all the information that Chris and I teach in our intro to Geology classes, it's all there for you with some key images

Chris Bolhuis: That's right.

Cheers. [00:34:30]

Jesse Reimink

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PlanetGeo Podcast