
How to Read a Paper (2016) [pdf] - jdale27
http://blizzard.cs.uwaterloo.ca/keshav/home/Papers/data/07/paper-reading.pdf
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haffi112
> The first version of this document was drafted by my students: Hossein
> Falaki, Earl Oliver, and Sumair Ur Rahman.

The paper is two pages. Why aren't these people included as authors then...?

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AndrewOMartin
I was all ready to mock this by saying how most papers get only 1) Read the
abstract, 2) Read the conclusion, 3) Look at the graphics, from me.

Turns out that it's basically what the paper says, but then goes into more
detail about going into more detail. Worth at least a second pass :)

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nickpsecurity
It's how I got through over 10,000 papers on IT and INFOSEC. When they're
well-written, I could look at the abstract, a select bit of details, related
work, and conclusion. Would take me about a minute or so a paper once I got
good at it. Sometimes less. Some papers were more complex or just not well
written where it took significantly more time to evaluate them. All in all,
though, the speed reading methods save a ton of time.

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Cyph0n
It typically takes much longer to actually understand the contribution of a
paper in engineering fields (EE, for example). Of course, it depends on how
much background you have prior to reading the paper.

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nickpsecurity
The background accumulates as you thoroughly read them. You can understand a
lot without knowing all the specifics. The good papers will usually explain
the challenges, approaches so far, their weaknesses, their solution, and
future work that's essentially the solution's weaknesses. One can get pretty
far with that. Even formal verification papers were easy to follow _on general
idea of their methods or results_ without know the specialist stuff. Same with
digital design. I only started getting slowed down, ineffective, or stomped
when it was about analog or RF papers. It's why I keep saying one might not be
able to cheat those. Not entirely, anyway: my abstract predictions of
techniques like A2, the fab material mod, semi-automated synthesis with
stochastic methods, or chaining gates together in tamper-resistance show my
almost detail-less mental model is still better than nothing. I already had
mitigations for two just guessing something might happen with that mental
model. ;)

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Cyph0n
True, but reading the intro and background/prior work sections takes approx.
5-10 minutes. And depending on the length of the paper, these sections may be
pretty succinct and therefore not very helpful to a reader unfamiliar with the
state of the art.

I agree. You can usually understand the general contributions and how they
work at a high level pretty easily. But intuitively and deeply understanding a
paper takes much more time from my experience. Again, YMMV.

I also have almost zero experience with analog haha! I'm going to be taking an
intermediate course on analog circuits next semester. I'm interested in
jumping into the field of analog hardeare security, so it's a necessary first
step.

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colmvp
I think you're correct in your intuition.

I recall watching a recent talk by Andrew Ng who mentioned that reading
research papers is a key method in improving as deep learning specialist /
data scientist, but that one should temper their expectations of knowledge
acquisition. One might spend a Sunday trying to go deep into a paper, but at
the end of the weekend that person may barely get much out of it. He even
admits that sometimes it takes him a couple reads over a course of several
sessions to fully grasp a new concept. Which isn't all that surprising given
the information asymmetry between the authors and the reader.

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tpetricek
This has some nice hints on how to read the text of a paper, but I think it
misses all the important things that you need to be aware when you want to
understand a paper. In particular, things like the research paradigm or
research programme in which the paper fits, its historical context etc. I
wrote a post about this recently: [http://tomasp.net/blog/2017/papers-we-
scrutinize/](http://tomasp.net/blog/2017/papers-we-scrutinize/)

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rocket_woman
On the writing side of things, I really enjoyed this talk:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_6xoMjFr70](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_6xoMjFr70)
"How to Write Papers So People Can Read Them"

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DanAndersen
My advisor (Voicu Popescu) wrote a couple of nice materials about "How to
Write a CS Paper". The emphasis is mostly on how to do it in the computer
graphics field, but perhaps it's applicable to other CS domains too:

In prose form:
[http://webarchiv.ethz.ch/digitalartweeks/web/uploads/DAWIntr...](http://webarchiv.ethz.ch/digitalartweeks/web/uploads/DAWIntra/test.pdf)

In slide form:
[http://spaf.cerias.purdue.edu/classes/Popescu.pdf](http://spaf.cerias.purdue.edu/classes/Popescu.pdf)

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c0achmcguirk
This part was most interesting to me:

 _" Incidentally, when you write a paper, you can expect most reviewers (and
readers) to make only one pass over it."_

I understand reviewers are busy, but we depend on peer review to filter out
bad or poorly-researched material. I don't think one pass is enough.

Obviously, so does the author.

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seanmcdirmid
Depending on the conference or journal, most papers can be rejected in one
pass. Heck, the reviewer might abort after the intro if the paper is
particularly bad.

The papers that make it past one pass get more scrutiny.

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UncleMeat
I've gotten reviews where it was obvious the reviewer didn't read the paper.
"You didn't address X at all" when I had a section heading under Discussion
labeled X in big bold font.

The review process is stochastic and leans towards reject by default.

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bfirsh
I thought that was going to be Trisha Greenhalgh's How to Read a Paper:
[https://www.amazon.com/How-Read-Paper-Evidence-Based-
Medicin...](https://www.amazon.com/How-Read-Paper-Evidence-Based-
Medicine/dp/1118800966/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1493543273&sr=8-1)

Superficially the same idea, but it is for advising medical practitioners on
how to apply research to their work. It goes about this by showing you how to
find research, critique it, analyse it, use meta-research, and so on.

For somebody not in medicine, it had some transferable advice on how to use
research in practice, but was mainly a detailed insight into how evidence-
based medicine works. Highly recommended.

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RichardHeart
If papers were written better, you might not need to read them over 3 times.

There should be a paper called "how to write useful headlines for your paper."

"first pass" "second pass" "third pass" should be replaced with unique,
useful, preferably memorable headlines. For instance: "Quick scan" "Deeper but
ignore details" and "Challenge every assumption in every statement"

Then you haven't wasted the attention those big bold headlines get.

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jonsterling
This is not true. Some of the best papers ever, I have benefited from reading
many times, more than three.

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spookyuser
Obviously a different set of circumstances, but I would be curious to hear
what people think about Cal Newport's Question; Evidence; Conclusion - method
of reading. From the grade A students guide. I recently switched to it and
found myself understanding reading assignments much better. It seems like this
method is more geared for Researchers though.

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rectang
I'd like to present a fourth option, the "0-pass":

Don't read most papers. Don't feel bad about not reading them, because in
general they are terribly written.

Instead, read follow-on work which resynthesizes the ideas in these papers for
a popular audience.

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Kepler-239b
Agreed. Most research papers are a headache to read, even in a field you are
familiar with. The full list of reasons is here:

[http://www.wikipaper.org/p/Why_So_Difficult](http://www.wikipaper.org/p/Why_So_Difficult)

The site above ^^ has not launched yet, but should help alleviate the problem.

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a3n
The site has launched far enough to attract spammers. It looks like you've got
some cleaning and monitoring to do:

[http://www.wikipaper.org/p/Special:AllPages](http://www.wikipaper.org/p/Special:AllPages)

Bookmarked your site, looks interesting for this non-academic.

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mad44
Another advice on the topic.

[http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2013/07/how-i-read-
research...](http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2013/07/how-i-read-research-
paper.html)

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f_allwein
I sometimes do an exercise with my students where I give them a paper and ask
them to tell me in 5 minutes what is the research question and the answer.
Usually works well (if the paper is well written), and shows hem that they can
get a good grasp of papers without spending hours reading them.

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nonbel
My experience from journal clubs is that strategies like this just encourages
parroting whatever is claimed without thinking critically.

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sytelus
For people in the field who are active authors and reviewers in CS/AI related
areas:

\- How many papers do you read per week?

\- How many hours you spent per week?

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mkhalil
I first-passed this paper, and realized I needed only a first minimal second
pass. Check what to do on the pass on that I on. Very helpful for new readers.

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unheroic
Well this would have been very useful 6 months ago, when I started working on
my undergraduate dissertation.

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squaredpants
This went way too meta for my procrastinating brain.

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sangd
I only got to 2nd pass for this paper.

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tedmiston
I found it interesting in a meta sort of way that the paper's first pass
ctechnique can't be applied to itself (there's no conclusion).

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mrcactu5
these "how to read articles" make me feel so illiterate -- having completed my
formal education 4 years ago. of course, the truth is we do not read closely,
and there are always new signals to look into

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darkmorning
I see a recursion in this post :p , Before learning to read other papers,
could you please explain how to read this paper :D

