What are research articles?

Research articles are the source of primary results and observations. They therefore also contain a description of how the results/observations were obtained -- the experimental methods -- for without this, you could not understand the results and their limitations. For more, see What is a research article?

Why are research articles?

In science, this is where the truth lives. Without research articles, all you can do is give back what others have fed you. For more, see Why bother with research articles?

Why old research articles?

Most of the articles you will be reading were written long before you were born. Why these? To a large extent, the concepts of molecular biology were worked out by the mid 1960's. If you want to read research articles that grapple with the basic concepts, that's where you'll find them. Even more important, a focus on contemporary articles would give you a broad spectrum of factlets, after wading through 50 years' worth of accumulated jargon and techniques (or as is more common, ignoring methods altogether). But this course is focused not on the what of molecular biology but on how you can learn it yourself. In your research project, you will probably get all the contemporary articles you can stand, within a narrow field that you define. There is an additional benefit of considering old articles. Bouncing back and forth between our present day knowledge and the time when that knowledge was gained gives you the experience of compartmentalizing what you know (or think you know). When you read an old article and think "Suppose I didn't already know that proteins are linear chains", that prepares you to develop the habit of questioning what you think you know, a practice at the heart of science.

Will there be help in reading research articles?

Yes! Believe me, research articles are seldom easy to read. You might think that research articles should be put off until you learn more molecular biology, but I've been learning the subject for a few decades, and it's still tough! The main thing I've learned is a habit of asking questions, of the article and of myself. I hope you will learn this too.

The best time to start is now. While there are steps you can take to make the articles more rewarding (see How to Read a Research Article), I anticipate you'll still need some help getting started. For some articles, I'll provide a companion -- me reading the article with you, asking the questions that occur to me. Here's an example of a companion. However, do not treat companions as text books! Don't read through the companion and pretend you've learned anything worthwhile. The value of these companions is to help you work through the article yourself.