Many of the visitors to this site are students at a variety of levels from grade schools all the way on up to medical students and biomedical graduate students. One of the things that often does not get discussed at any level of science education is: How to read a scientific paper. It is a different skill set than other kinds of literature and how to properly extract information from a scientific paper is an art that is built over years of reading, thinking and writing.
There is a short, but rather excellent review paper on “How to Read a Paper” by Srinivasan Keshav. Even though it was written by a computer science professor, it is generally applicable to many disciplines in science and if you are a student, it is well worth your time.