Above answer is pretty good. There was a professor at my school who gives an annual talk to some undergraduate bme research club about how to read/analyze a scientific paper. I'll see if I can find the powerpoint and PM it to you.
I think the advice boiled down to:
1. Look at the figures.
2. Google words and read the referencing text until the figures make sense.
Most of the real value that a biomedical scientific paper adds can be found in the figures. If you have a good grasp of the field, then you can fill in the majority of the background and results interpretation just by looking at the figures. majority=/=100%, of course, but still a lot.
as far as how to get to the point of being able to dissect papers like this, I recommend:
i) get involved in research in some way, if you can.
ii) pick a scientific paper, and don't just try to understand it - create your own powerpoint where you pretend to be giving an in-depth explanation of the paper to a scientific audience. prepare yourself for every question, explore every detail, anticipate difficult questions. The handful of times that I have done this, it has truly deepened my ability to understand science. kind of baffling that I'm too lazy to do it for myself more often. lol.
http://www.cell.com/molecular-cell/abstract/S1097-2765(10)00205-4
^That paper was what I did my first journal club on. It was so interesting. They kept doing all of these different experiments to test their hypotheses from different angles. I was used to math where if you prove something its just true, and after poring through this paper for 8+ hours, I feel like this extra layer of intellectual subtlety was added to my head. I at first couldn't understand why if we had already shown this result is true this way, we have to re-show it in some other context this other way, but after going through it several times it made sense.
If you need access to any pdfs, shoot me a pm.
