
How to Read a Research Paper [pdf] - yankoff
http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~michaelm/postscripts/ReadPaper.pdf
======
xtracto
My father (PhD in Malacology) taught me when I was a kid, that a research
paper should be read in the following steps

1\. Read title and abstract 2\. Read introduction 3\. Read conclusions 4\. If
the content of the 3 previous steps makes sense, and the paper is relevant: \-
Read the body of the paper \- Archive it and write bibliographic record card
(yup... that old school).

Worked me wonders in my PhD.

~~~
pmichaud
I've spent a lot of time recently doing a deep dive into all the academic
papers in a particular field of neurobiology, and I have a different approach:

1\. Read the title and abstract 2\. Read the methodology 3\. If the
methodology isn't totally asinine, then read the rest

I discovered after reading hundreds of papers that most of them are total
nonsense.

I found myself reading them and updating my "knowledge," then getting to the
methodology section and realizing it was bullshit. I felt like I couldn't
fully "un-update" my model when that happened, the damage was sort of done.

They make claims and they have "evidence" that sounds compelling enough to
slip by some filter, but then the methodology is totally bunk. The n is way
too small, or limited in some other fundamental way, the experiment design is
idiotic cargo cult stuff. Obviously just going through the motions of
publishing because they have to, rather than having some valuable insight.
Then papers like that cite each other, and build this whole wobbly network,
full of sound and fury, and signifying nothing.

I've learned to totally ignore any paper that I haven't read the methodology
for first.

~~~
disgruntledphd2
Critiquing the methodology section is the best part of reading scientific
papers. However, it soon becomes bittersweet as when you implement your own
experiments, you soon become aware of how difficult it is to design a good
experiment. That being said, if journalists read methodology sections (or
anyone, really) then the world would be a much better (and less
sensationalised) place.

------
jobigoud
On a related note, I just realized this week that there was an entire category
of software dedicated to doing something I've been painstakingly doing
manually for years, organizing your collection of papers.

They are called reference managers, and will extract the
title/year/author/abstract so you can quickly glance at that obscure
"iccp2012.pdf" you downloaded last month and know if it's relevant or not to
your current task. Provide full text search on your entire collection,
synchronization between home and work, etc.

Coming from an engineering background I had no idea these existed, but it sure
will save me a lot of time and frustration.

~~~
sjtrny
Your OS doesn't support full text search of PDFs?

~~~
roel_v
To badly paraphrase Star Wars, "your confidence in your friends is your
greatest weakness". Pdf sucks, it's little more than a glorified 2d graphics
api that happens to be used mostly for content that should be represented as
text. Except that there are dozens of ways to make stuff look like text, but
without the advantages.

~~~
sjtrny
This is true for some PDFs but not for academic ones produced by PDFLaTeX.

~~~
roel_v
If you're really suggesting what I'm reading into your post, which is that
'academic pdfs' are somehow some sort of glorious special species because
everybody in academia uses latex and all publications are typeset using that,
then I have a bridge in Brooklyn you might be interested in.

------
tnhh
I ask my students to read this:
[http://ccr.sigcomm.org/online/files/p83-keshavA.pdf](http://ccr.sigcomm.org/online/files/p83-keshavA.pdf)

~~~
WWWWH
Looks good; I'll be doing the same thing and passing this on to the students.

------
bkcooper
I think the overall advice here is pretty solid. I might add a couple
comments:

\--- The time budget is extremely sensitive to how much you already know about
the subject. If you're generally up on the literature in an area, it is often
much easier to isolate the chunks that are genuinely new to you and thereby
grok the paper very quickly. In a new field, even several hours to really read
a paper might not be enough, depending on how much backtracking you need to do
to understand core ideas.

\--- In physics, the conventional wisdom (which I agree with) is that the main
thing to do when checking out a paper is to look at the figures. These are
generally chosen to highlight the most important points of the paper and will
often quickly convey what was measured/calculated, how the effect scales, etc.

------
Scitr
Then there's how to read a research paper _for hackers_.

I see each article as a patch. Our minds are both running operating systems
and decentralized repos. Each of us are specialized and running a different
custom OS, so may require different sets of patches.

Science is specifically concerned with our mental models of how the world
works. Different fields in science are like different levels of abstraction in
programming.

My specialty leans more towards higher levels, so subjects like psychology,
philosophy, biology, are more relevant to my mental model than lower level
mathematics, chemistry, and physics.

When I read research articles, I'm primarily interested in extracting an
abstract high-level idea, which I can apply to my repo. I start with the end
of the abstract, then discussion, conclusion, results, to find the main point,
then only look at details if I can use them.

Once I have a simple idea, I merge it by connecting it to related ideas in a
functional way. Each idea then becomes like a code snippet of a function, and
my process of learning is like coding, where although you may copy/paste a
snippet off the web, you still need to reason with logic to connect it into
your code so it actually works.

If I can't make something work right now in my repo, it doesn't commit, so is
temporarily stashed, where I may either forget about it, or come back to it if
I find the missing pieces to fit it into the working directory.

~~~
sjtrny
I like this analogy, I find myself falling into a similar pattern.
Particularly when I can't understand something because I lack the
understanding of its mathematical basis for example. I put it aside and have
found myself returning to those papers once other things I have coincidentally
read allow me to have a better understanding.

------
esfandia
I'm afraid the one-page review assignment part at the end of the article won't
give much satisfaction to the instructor who came up with it. A lazy student
could simply paraphrase the paper abstract to address the first two bullets
(summary, arguments, conclusions).

I think asking for a one-page detailed example and illustration of the paper
would force a more careful read, and would be more interesting for sharing
with peers.

------
ganessh
As the author mentioned that there will be follow up on how to skim a paper,
anyone knows the link to that or how to write a paper?

~~~
swimfar
Here are some references from "How to read a paper" by S. Keshav [1](found in
a comment by tnhh above)

Writing Technical Articles [http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~hgs/etc/writing-
style.html](http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~hgs/etc/writing-style.html)

Whiteside's Group:Writing a paper:
[http://www.ee.ucr.edu/~rlake/Whitesides_writing_res_paper.pd...](http://www.ee.ucr.edu/~rlake/Whitesides_writing_res_paper.pdf)

[1]
[http://ccr.sigcomm.org/online/files/p83-keshavA.pdf](http://ccr.sigcomm.org/online/files/p83-keshavA.pdf)

------
ExpiredLink
> _But to really guage the scientific merit, you must compare the paper to
> other works in the area._

Know what you read!

~~~
sitkack
This is probably true in the hard sciences, but not necessarily in mainstream
CS which is a mixture of empirical evidence, engineering and current best
practices.

------
jheriko
> Read critically

surely that means accepting that a bulk of research papers are written
exceptionally poorly with excessive wordiness and jargon, a lack of good
paragraph structure and not very much real content.

if you have to tell people who can read how to read something, its probably
written incorrectly.

~~~
kd0amg
No change in writing style will let the researcher who reads it get out of
thinking about how the ideas might be useful in their own work, what the
authors might have done wrong without realizing it, etc.

------
ux
s/paper/code/g and you get a nice read about code review

~~~
leni536
Or it can be generalized to any persistent, human-readable and compressed form
of complex ideas. Good papers and working good source code are in this
category.

------
IdAgreeWithThat
The person who needs instructions for reading a research paper probably
ahouldn't even bother. I've seen way too many graduate (including doctoral)
students need to be spoonfed how to do things. These people never turn into
original thinkers who are capable of even slightly meaningful output
(contributions to their field), in my experience.

~~~
WWWWH
I tend to disagree. Everyone has to do even the simplest of tasks for the
first time and reinventing the wheel is often a waste of effort.

If you think that everyone just knows how to do this, take a close look at
your last set of reviewer comments; were all of them pithy, accurate and
demonstrating a close understanding of your work?

