

Why you should read academic papers - rafaelc
http://blog.rafaelcorrales.com/2011/01/all-you-have-to-do-is-consume-and.html

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parenthesis
A positive side effect of regularly reading good academic papers (or books) is
that fluffy blog posts etc. are, in contrast, readily perceived as vacuous,
and are thus easily ignored. [To be clear, the present blog post is a good
one: it makes a good point, and is no longer than it ought to be.]

~~~
quanticle
The problem is in finding the good academic papers. For someone like me who is
not affiliated with a university, the best papers are often behind paywalls.

~~~
_delirium
For recent stuff in computer science this is somewhat less of a problem,
because most people post PDFs of their own papers on their websites. Citeseer
(<http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/>) indexes and caches the self-hosted PDFs as
well.

~~~
silentbicycle
CiteseerX is _fantastic._

Once you find a good paper or two (and/or the academic literature's relevant
buzzwords for your issue), you can span out through the citations for quite a
while. "Introduction / Survey of ..." papers (e.g.
[http://archives.cs.iastate.edu/documents/disk0/00/00/02/04/0...](http://archives.cs.iastate.edu/documents/disk0/00/00/02/04/00000204-01/TR93-01c.pdf))
exist _mainly_ for the bibliography. Also, when you find someone whose name
keeps coming up, look for their faculty page, e.g. Andrew Appel's
(<http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/papers/>).

For papers that don't have .pdf or .ps files cached on Citeseer (due to
primary hosting behind the ACM's paywall) try searching on Google Scholar and
clicking "X other versions". Typically, the ACM is the _first_ result, but
faculty pages have publicly visible copies.

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dimatura
You can't just 'consume and digest' any paper that you come across. It's like
trying to drink from a firehose. Assuming you already have a field of
interest, I recommend looking at the last few years of the top conferences and
journals in that field. That will give you what's trendy right now, of course.
To find 'landmark papers' in a field, one way is looking at suggested readings
from (possibly graduate) course websites (e.g. from OCW) in the topic of
interest.

~~~
glesperance
I do agree with you here, trying to consume and digest everything that comes
out in one's field of interrest is not only pretty hard but also extensively
time consuming.

I guess the point of the article is more to, induce people into considering
more academic papers when they do research -- that is, either for their own
non-academic or academic research.

I always find it interesting to read those, when they're closely related to
what I'm trying to do or what I am currently doing / researching.

And as far, as trying to catch-up with a whole field of interest, often
enough, there are books -- written by the same researchers that wrote the
papers you missed -- that presents you the latest advancement in the field
over the past years ; all the while presenting you the way of thought that
accompanies these discoveries... A good example of that would be "Burst" by
A.-L. Barabási, a personal favorite :)

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jseliger
There's another reason to read their papers, which I describe in "How to get
your Professors’ Attention — along with Coaching or Mentoring"
([http://jseliger.com/2010/10/02/how-to-get-your-
professors%E2...](http://jseliger.com/2010/10/02/how-to-get-your-
professors%E2%80%99-attention-or-how-to-get-the-coaching-and-mentorship-you-
need)): you want to signal to your professors that you're worth investing in.
Most people aren't, and one way to distinguish yourself is to read their work,
since the majority of students—even those who say they will—won't.

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orangewarp
Like others are mentioning, I've always found it curious how difficult it is
for people outside of academia to access good journals and articles. It's even
more puzzling because in academia we're always trying to shout to the world
that this knowledge ought to be utilized. That said, I think some fields have
a much better relationship with industry than others. In my field of
education, it's a rather big problem disseminating findings to the front line.
As for tips, I've found that a good way to stay on top of knowledge broadly is
to read edited handbooks and reviews. These sources might not be the newest
but they certainly condense a lot of good empirical findings that have been
tested over time and highlight the most important branches and directions.
It's also kind of interesting to find who the grad students of the most
prominent figures are and read their papers, proceedings. A) They're dying to
talk about their stuff, B) They have the guidance of an experienced scholar,
and C) They have that energy to drive into quite interesting and new
territory.

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kabdib
If my employer didn't provide access to the ACM online library, I would pay
for the dues myself.

It would be nicer if access were free, but even at 'prox $200 / year it's a
great deal.

I daresay that keeping up with the ACM papers has extended my career by at
least a decade.

~~~
thomas11
Your last statement is very interesting. Frequently, one hears about the
divide between academia and the real world, and how much research---even in CS
---is unlikely to ever have practical benefits. Could you give an example or
two of the ACM subscription being the key element for a step forward in your
career?

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kia
While I agree that many scientific articles are worth reading, I think that
it's almost impossible to read everything even in your field of interest. The
point is to get the most interesting and important ones.

So I suggest reading what is called Review articles following the references
if necessary.

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mindcrime
A semi-cool place for finding interesting papers to read is here:

<http://www.reddit.com/r/compscipapers>

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nazgulnarsil
also: textbooks are cheap (anything behind the latest edition has high supply
and low demand as all of last year's students dump them).

you can receive tomes that cover vast swathes of human knowledge for the price
of a sandwich. trying to educate yourself online usually doesn't compare to a
really excellent textbook.

~~~
rdouble
Math textbooks are not cheap.

~~~
nochiel
"Math textbooks are not cheap."

Actually, they are _free_. I am a graduate student in Mathematics and there is
no book, on any level of mathematics that I have been unable to find for free
download.

Places like www.avaxhome.ws and old.pdfchm.net are chock-full of math
textbooks not to mention the torrents which can be found on isohunt.com and
thepiratebay.org that consist of collections of thousands upon thousands of
graduate level mainstream and esoteric mathematics texts, all high quality
scans.

In total, I have many thousands of dollars worth of mathematics books, all of
which I have obtained for free (and I feel justified; there's simply no cost-
effective way to obtain those books on my side of the planet).

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Joakal
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