
My New Year’s Resolution – read a research paper every weekday - ingve
https://blog.acolyer.org/2016/12/29/my-new-years-resolution-read-a-research-paper-every-weekday/
======
jorgemf
You can read one paper a day, but I am not sure you can understand one paper a
day.

At least for me during my PhD I spent more than a full-time day to completely
understand papers that were interesting for my research.

~~~
rubidium
I'd state it with a bit more nuance.

From my experience in physics:

You can read a paper in 15-30 minutes and get the main points and
contributions.

For good papers, you can spend multiple days to really understand the paper.

And for really good papers you can spends months to completely understand
them, then extend them, and then publish your dissertation.

~~~
ianai
My bet is OP meant the surface read. I'd say that's a fine thing to do.

~~~
princeb
i feel like you could read the summary section and the results section in
about 15 minutes.

------
saeranv
Question: What are the selection criteria people use to determine which papers
to read.

I went through a period where I tried to get in the habit of reading research
papers regularly. Two issues I found that lead me to eventually dropping this:

(1) At least in my industry (generative architecture & building performance
modeling) it's frustrating how often papers don't include technical details,
and resort simply to a high-level overviews of implementation and go straight
to detailing their outcome. I don't learn much from such papers.

(2) Low return of value of simply just reading the paper. I went through a
period where I tried to read a paper everyday. By the end of this period I had
a massive stack of highlighted, and annotated research papers I kept in a
folder on my desk. And that folder has remained there untouched to this day.
So I find there is low value in simply consuming research, and the key for me
at least is to actually struggle through and implement the research I read.
Which is why point (1) is key for me.

I'm inspired by your post though, I want to start getting back into a slightly
modified version of this. Identify research papers with algorithms I can play
with/experiment - and then implement it, aiming for something like a paper per
week or so? This process means I won't be able to do a paper per day, but
it'll be a lot more valuable/interesting to me. This calls for a new git
repo...

~~~
jonwachob91
>resort simply to a high-level overviews of implementation and go straight to
detailing their outcome

Those don't sound like research papers but articles... What Journal(s) are you
finding these papers in?

~~~
saeranv
Is it only a research paper if it is published in a journal? What about
conference papers?

Here's an example I was reading recently which doesn't go into much detail:
[http://www.ibpsa.org/proceedings/asim2012/0097.pdf](http://www.ibpsa.org/proceedings/asim2012/0097.pdf)
from the International Building Performance Simulation Association (IBPSA)
conference.

~~~
tnecniv
Conferences certainly count if they are refereed (peer reviewed).

I don't know anything about that field, but that paper certainly doesn't pass
the first glance test that others have mentioned in this thread. Good figures,
etc.

------
arnarbi
Spend some time on context. Reading papers in isolation maybe makes you
appreciate the idea that it presents, but understanding how that idea came
about and what alternative ideas it replaced or subsumed primes you for
extending or applying it. For that it's perhaps more valuable to scan more
background material loosely, rather than just adding today's references to
your reading list. Also it's very helpful to pay attention to names and
affiliations when doing this.

Another pitfall I've had with regular reading like "a paper a day/week" is not
to discard papers fast enough. Often the abstract either oversells the
results, or the details are simply too obvious to you to learn anything new
from them. Learn to recognize "weak" (to you) papers early and skim through
the rest of it quickly or look for better sources on the topic.

I'd suggest aiming to understand an idea a week, which maybe involves reading
2-4 papers, and skimming 15-20 more, plus background material in textbooks and
Wikipedia. Doing that in 8-12 hours would already be pretty efficient.

------
jmnicholson
You should try writing these on authorea.com (get DOI and permanent archival).
Basically, turning them into official pieces of open post-publication peer
review. Could cross-post to your blog too still!

------
egl2016
Andrew Ng on this topic:

"...if you seriously study half a dozen papers a week and you do that for two
years, after those two years you will have learned a lot."

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/13/andrew-
ng_n_7267682...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/13/andrew-
ng_n_7267682.html)

------
djhworld
I've been reading Adrian's blog for about a year now, I honestly I don't know
how he finds the time.

------
mtw
I don't know about CompSci research. However I do
[http://outcomereference.com/](http://outcomereference.com/) which is just a
side-project and read about 2-3 medical research papers everyday and the
biggest challenge is open access to papers. It is possible to find the PDFs on
various research sites but the vast majority is costly (avg $40 per paper).
Not sure if there is free & open access for CompSci research?

~~~
imranq
I like the idea of scientifically vetting foods, but as you said it might be
hard coming up with a balanced viewpoint if you are not considering all the
research. Also might be helpful to consider the impact factor of each paper
you are citing.

~~~
matt4077
Let me get my smart-ass instinct out of the way first: journals have impact
factors, not papers :)

But it doesn't really matter because it's a somewhat-empty vanity-metric
anyway. For assessing clinical trials (and aggregating their results) the
Cochrane collaboration is probably the gold standard. Here's something I found
on their method to evaluate trial quality:
[http://www.bmj.com/content/343/bmj.d5928](http://www.bmj.com/content/343/bmj.d5928)

------
orthoganol
> If you like the idea of being exposed to more research and cutting-edge
> ideas over 2017...

Why not just read abstracts? It doesn't seem like his goal is more than "Let's
see what people are up to."

In the context of AI / ML / DL, white papers were useful for me when I had a
very specific task in mind and wanted to see the cutting edge approaches.
Outside of that, I wasted untold hours I wish I had back reading white papers
because they seemed important. I don't think I really got anything useful at
the end of the day, in terms of advancing my projects. I also believe some
deep learning papers completely exaggerate their results while being
intentionally vague on how they implemented, and I wish had those hours back
too trying to replicate.

I don't know, I disagree with the notion that it's inherently good to read a
bunch of white papers. Better I think is work on your project, and when there
are gaps go searching for papers.

------
gburdell
I would say that he's insane, but his blog already summarizes a research paper
every weekday. I had thrown around the idea of doing this with my own field,
but I found that it took me the better part of a day to really understand the
paper, much less commit a summary to prose.

------
pknerd
This should be a movement.

I will try to read at 1 paper per month. Good enough for a beginner.

~~~
drdre2001
You might be interested in Fermart's
Library:[http://fermatslibrary.com](http://fermatslibrary.com)

------
Joky
In my field (Software), I find more profitable to me to watch one 40 min video
from a conference rather than trying to understand a paper where the author
had to compress all the information in a silly 10 pages limit from a random
conference.

As an author it is amazing how I feel I can communicate my work more
efficiently, and with pedagogy in a talk with slides (or in a blog post maybe)
than in the constraints of an academic paper.

------
LunaSea
Are there any good feeds of newly written machine learning research papers
that are worth reading and that is regularly updated?

------
petercooper
I wonder if a higher level equivalent of this could be to read a full IEEE
article every day (from the right publications, of course), since these often
seem to be more accessible writeups of academic papers anyway and a lot of the
hard work of curating and picking out the key details has been done.

------
acaloiar
I'm not sure that one can derive significant value from reading a research
paper per day. Great research is not easily grokked or appreciated upon first
read. I think one would derive far more value from reading a single paper for
an entire week.

------
mohitmun
This is a good stackexchange thread
[http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/1168/what-
papers...](http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/1168/what-papers-
should-everyone-read)

------
codeddesign
Anyone know of good online libraries to find research papers?

~~~
fanf2
[http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/)

------
urlwolf
I agree wih the rest : this is too hard. Some papers will take a long time to
grasp. More so after we have been conditioned to read things fast on he web.

------
twoslide
Yes, I'm planning to cut back too. - An academic

------
tps5
You're right, that does sound crazy.

------
PikelEmi
Just read or read AND understand ?

