How do you study a study?

I agree with most of the advice here, but there are a few other things you should consider. Your view of new studies coming out and completely discrediting another isn't that accurate. Science is about an accumulation of knowledge and deciding which way the evidence leads. There are times when a study is retracted (eg. for http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:ewfdV87KEFcJ:press.thelancet.com/wakefieldretraction.pdf+lancet+retracted+article&hl=en&gl=ca&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEEShmohPj_UHJsv724vDO36T4IN1slgKGEAC3cUQtWNMa1rACN4SnrfGHnUSszz7UY9ttbB1-vLFqeHK9IX1Bonr_zly_CnVw5FEF-olgh44tMSabQ7mA1G97J3Ay1_tY6c0x4MOm&sig=AHIEtbQI4TSPSWqHsNXNLCnNhYcYBr46NA), you can watch for journals to put out notices like this, however this is rare. To get a better view of a subject, you might want to look at review articles or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaanalysis. The latter is a study that pools data from a number of previous studies, while the former is a peer-reviewed summary by a specialist on a particular subject. For medical studies, for example, http://www2.cochrane.org/reviews/ are often held in high regard.

Is there a place that keeps track of developments that happen to a particular study after a study is published? No. Are there particular websites that are better for looking up this sort of thing than others? No. Is there a secret Google-fu manueuver that will get better results? Any resources that are particular to certain disciplines? Other than "[terms from original study] disconfirm" or related terms like discredit or wrong etc, no. what are the easiest ways for a layperson to get access to the text of studies? Go to a university library.

Not quite what you're asking but I have a site http://sciencerumors.org/ which I'm setting up to collaboratively gather and rank information about scientific studies. Basically my goal is for the layperson to have a place to go and learn/debunk/research, and for it to act as a filter where you can see only the studies that are already verified to some extent or other. I'm planning to do most of this based on metadata about the study, its publication, its methodology, etc. I also want to track whether it's a confirmation or refutation of an earlier study/theory, or purely new data. Your desire to look at a study and see what later studies have affected its usefulness is cool and while it's not the focus of the site I'll have to make sure to do it as much as the data we're gathering allows. Unfortunately it's a placeholder site still but I'm committed to getting it rolling soon. If anyone would like to be contacted once I've got it rolling, or would like to get involved please do let me know.

One thing you could do is look into which journal published the paper. Some journals are known for being the best, everything they publish is rigorously peer reviewed and they also publish letters to the editor from other experts in the field giving their opinion on the study after the fact. These journals also require anything published in them have a thorough limitations discussion, in which the authors admit and describe every last thing that could possibly be un-perfect with the study and how it could alter the conclusions... then there are journals who have a reputation for publishing just about anything. I have myself (along with many colleagues) published scientific literature and there is definitely a list we will go down... try to get it published with Journal A, if they don't accept it, move down to Journal B and so on. No study is perfect. You could find the best designed study in history and still pick it apart and question it's conclusions. Ideally, become well-versed in study design and read the study yourself! as others have mentioned, University libraries will have them.

(and 'significant' in science means a very specific thing: that the results have been statistically examined and that the reported relationship is only 5% (or whatever the level of statistical significance being used is) likely to have occurred by chance) Not to pick on you, damonism, but "statistically significant" does mean a very specific thing, and that is not it. In the case of a significance level of 0.05, it means that the results as large or larger or larger than the reported results are 5% likely to occur if the null hypothesis is true. This is a very common error, currently listed as #2 on the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-value#Frequent_misunderstandings of the p-value in Wikipedia. In http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2009/10/30-01.html with Harvard biostatistics chair Victor De Gruttola ("passionate about his p-values") says about this error, "It's not that. It's really not like that. It's the difference between I own the house or the house owns me. It's two different concepts." In other words, your formulation is P(H0 | D = data) but p is actually P(D ≥ data | H0). The former seems more like something that would be more useful to measure but it is impossible with the frequentist statistical framework used in classical hypothesis testing.

We have a guide to deciding when to change your behavior based on new medical research at stats.org http://www.stats.org/in_depth/evaluate_healthrisks/How_eval_health_risks.htm. The rest of the site also has resources that may be helpful in evaluating research claims.

Thanks again everyone, I appreciate all these answers. And vsync, hell yes I would love to be contacted when you get it rolling; that sounds like a cool idea!

You can search http://scholar.google.com for the article of interest, and then click the "Cited by" link. Also, the relevant page on the journal's website is likely to have a similar link. There was a http://ask.metafilter.com/136367/Where-can-I-get-affordable-online-access-to-academic-journals about finding copies of journal articles online.

Not to pick on you, damonism, but "statistically significant" does mean a very specific thing, and that is not it. I stand corrected then. In my defence, it has been 14 years since I last took a statistics course :-)