I would agree. I'm actually quite a few years out of school though, I have around 5 years of experience. I do have a bit of graduate-level experience but basically never did any real kind of research. That's why I think I'm struggling lol.

I assume you mean “in graduate school on”. Having worked in scientific modelling I read a hell of a lot of field specific papers when implementing tools. They were the spec sheets for the work, containing the mathematical model, it’s validation or application.

For me, paper with a hiliter and a pen or the digital equivalents worked. I ended up with a marked up document that made the fine details easy to find and had text that could be used in documentation.