
Ask HN: Where do you find interesting papers to read? - frigg
I&#x27;d like to start reading a couple of [academic] papers a week, but I&#x27;m not sure where to look for interesting ones. What are your sources?
======
shalmanese
For any particular subfield of CS (Machine learning, Computer Vision, HCI,
etc.), find some top universities that offer graduate seminars, find the
website which will usually list a reading list.

For example, from UW:

Machine Learning:
[http://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse590m2/09au/](http://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse590m2/09au/)
HCI:
[http://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse590h/13au/](http://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse590h/13au/)

I've found graduate reading seminars usually try to present a mix of seminal,
eclectic and recent that gives you a diverse overview of the field.

~~~
muneeb
Completely agree with this approach. Conferences, at least for me, are not
that helpful. Grad level advanced courses are usually the best resource
because other people have "filtered" interesting content and organized it into
some common theme e.g, I recently took Kai Li's course on "Big Data":

[http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/spring13/cos598C...](http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/spring13/cos598C/schedule.html)

And discovered interesting papers from conferences that I'd never otherwise
look at.

------
PeterisP
If you have a specific topic in mind, find out the top conference(s) in the
area (for many areas in CS the top resources tend to be conferences, for other
topics it would be journals), and read all of the abstracts. You'll get a
feeling on what is considered 'bleeding edge'.

From that start point - just 'crawl' for (a) interesting papers cited there,
and (b) other things written by authors you found interesting, they'll often
have the non-paywall versions of their papers available on their site.

~~~
masterofmasters
For the lazy person who wants to cut down on the "crawling", try this listing
of Best Paper Awards across pretty much every CS discipline:
[http://jeffhuang.com/best_paper_awards.html](http://jeffhuang.com/best_paper_awards.html)

------
stevenbedrick
The ACL Anthology is a free online archive of the last couple of decades'
worth of Association for Computational Linguistics-sponsored journals and
conference proceedings, which is where many people working in computational
linguistics, natural language processing, machine translation, etc. hang out
and publish.

HOWTO get started:

1\. Pick a recent conference;

2\. Click on the titles of any articles that look interesting;

3\. When you get to the end of each article, dig through its bibliography.
Many/most of the paper's references will also be available in the ACL
Anthology; if not, Google Scholar will probably be a good resource for chasing
them down. GOTO step 2.

Enjoy!

[http://aclweb.org/anthology/](http://aclweb.org/anthology/)

------
vowelless
CS starter pack: [http://blog.fogus.me/2011/09/08/10-technical-papers-every-
pr...](http://blog.fogus.me/2011/09/08/10-technical-papers-every-programmer-
should-read-at-least-twice/)

------
spindritf
There are many excellent sources nowadays. Especially if you're into physics
or economics but not necessarily.

The most general is the Daily Roundup at National Affairs where you get titles
and abstracts of papers fitting the daily theme (lousily). RSS available.

[http://www.nationalaffairs.com/blog/blogger/findings-a-
daily...](http://www.nationalaffairs.com/blog/blogger/findings-a-daily-
roundup)

For arXiv there are blogs highlighting papers, like this one

[http://www.technologyreview.com/contributor/emerging-
technol...](http://www.technologyreview.com/contributor/emerging-technology-
from-the-arxiv/rss/)

For economics, be sure to subscribe to the RSS feeds of NBER and IZA. Note
that those are not reviewed.

[http://www.nber.org/rss/](http://www.nber.org/rss/)

[http://www.iza.org/en/webcontent/publications/papers](http://www.iza.org/en/webcontent/publications/papers)

Availability varies. But you can usually find a prepub by just Googling.

------
cottonseed
If you don't know what to read, why do you want to read papers? What are you
hoping to get out of this? The collective academic works are immense. It is
hard to know how to give advice without knowing more.

tl;dr: arXiv. But I do mathematics, so YMMV.

------
cyanoacry
If you're just starting reading academic papers, I highly suggest delving into
background and seminal papers in the field first, because the terminology in
contemporary papers is usually pretty precise and depends on already knowing
the field. Typically my workflow looks like:

    
    
      1. Pick a field.
      2. Look on Wikipedia, get a feel for history and seminal papers. Also
         cross-reference any summary papers that you might see in ACM/Nature/Science.
      3. Flip through a textbook on the topic and see if you can start grokking the
         terms. The useful textbooks will probably name more fundamental research
         that will serve as good reading.
      4. Start digging back in sources. You'll start seeing familiar names pop up,
         these are usually the seminal authors in the field, or people who write
         really good summary papers.
    
         If you google the topic, and all the papers you find reference "x et al"
         in their abstract, you probably want to find that paper. 
    
      5. Read from back to front. Skip a little in the middle if pressed for time.
      6. Now you can read papers on Nature/arXiv/Google and be well-prepared for the
         terminology.
    

I like to study synchrotrons and particle accelerators in my spare time, so I
looked at Wikipedia to find out about the history of the field[1]. This lead
me to Courant and Snyder's landmark paper[2] about the basis of strong
focusing (how to keep all those particles in a thin ring without gigantic,
building-sized magnets). Through some Googling and helpful advice I found a
free textbook about accelerators[3], which lead me to the granddaddy of
papers, M. Sand's summary of basically everything accelerator related [4].

I think the above approach should work for any field, but the openness of the
field will vary a lot. Physics and math typically have large collections of
PDFs online, but I'm not sure how good CS or bioengineering is in that regard.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchrotron](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchrotron)

[2] [http://ab-abp-rlc.web.cern.ch/ab-abp-rlc/AP-
literature/Coura...](http://ab-abp-rlc.web.cern.ch/ab-abp-rlc/AP-
literature/Courant-Snyder-1958.pdf)

[3] [http://www.fieldp.com/cpa.html](http://www.fieldp.com/cpa.html)

[4]
[http://slac.stanford.edu/pubs/slacreports/reports02/slac-r-1...](http://slac.stanford.edu/pubs/slacreports/reports02/slac-r-121.pdf)

edit: formatting

------
bnegreve
There is usually very little value in individual papers. You have to read a
lot of them, not entirely though. If you don't know anything about a topic,
start with wikipedia, check the references, also check google and google
scholar with some relevant keywords. Read some papers, read at least the
introduction and the related work section. From that it's usually easy to
identify what are the important references and the important keywords. After
checking 5 / 10 papers you usually have a good understanding of the important
problems of the topic and you can call yourself an expert :)

Anyway, what topic are you interested in?

------
kabdib
The ACM online library (best $200/year I spend).

Usenix conference proceedings.

There are journals that priced themselves into irrelevance (Software Practice
and Experience, I'm looking at you).

I try to read a couple papers a week, usually augmenting with Wikipedia tours
to cover subjects I'm weak in.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Most of the ACM DL papers can be found online somewhere else (like via
citeseer, or Google Scholar). For moral reasons, don't support the academic
pay walls if you can help it.

------
rippersid
The best option is as many have pointed out - Google Scholar.

But the very next I have personally found is ssrn.com - which is an open
source repository.

You will also find that more and more papers are being hosted on arXiv.org.

If I am reading a book that links to specific academic papers, I'll first try
google scholar, then a google search for the primary author. If the first
doesn't return a link to a free copy, you will usually find it on the authors
.edu homepage.

------
thebillywayne
I receive monthly Table of Contents [ToC] alert emails from specific journals
in which I'm interested, mainly chemistry and physics. This typically involves
simply creating an account at the publishers website and choosing which of
their journals you'd like to receive ToC alerts for, e.g. the American
Chemical Society (acs.org), and then sign up for e.g. Journal of Chemical
Theory and Computation alerts.

Also, for computational chemistry, at least, there's the Computational
Chemistry Highlights blog [
[http://www.compchemhighlights.org/](http://www.compchemhighlights.org/) ],
which selects (what they think are) interesting papers published within the
past two years or so.

Finally, I follow scientiests' blogs and social media, who will typically
share excellent papers that they find. Email lists like the Computational
Chemistry List [ ccl.net ] will usually discuss papers as they relate to the
conversations at hand.

Unfortunately, many of the excellent chemistry journals are behind pay walls.

This is how I harvest info for chemistry. I think it's highly probably that
this same method could be used for all scholarly disciplines.

Best of luck.

------
GuerraEarth
Hi frigg. GuerraEarth here. You might do what I just did. I looked at your
profile to see what kinds of comments you've made in the past to get an idea
of your tastes before offering comment. That is what you want to do--don't
just go to some site and read stuff. But thoughtfully follow your interests
(your wallpaper is of Mars). I am from JPL where the Mars rovers were built.
In a big sandbox. The prototypes. A play box. They build all kinds of cool
stuff there. If you go to the JPL page and choose scientists that do research
you like, read some of their papers. All the people at JPL are good or they
aren't at JPL. And look at this really interesting new toy that let's u see
the surface of the sun.

[http://www.helioviewer.org](http://www.helioviewer.org) -and-
[http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/?type=current](http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/?type=current)

------
timdellinger
Figure out which journals cover the subject matter you're most interested in
(likely ~5), and read the table of contents whenever a new issue comes out.

If you want to stay up to speed on the latest and greatest across a wide range
of topics, Science and Nature are often worth a read; those are weekly.

And then once you have favorite authors, you can set up automated searches to
alert you whenever they publish something.

Having a peek at a listing of the talks being presented at conferences usually
gives you a sneak preview of what's going to be published "soon" since people
often give talks on a subject before they publish a paper on it. Conferences
are also broken into subject areas, again helping you find what's of interest
to you.

------
eru
Lambda the ultimate is a good starting point for functional programming
related computer science.

------
johnbender
While this doesn't help you decide on the topic, if you have even a vague
sense for what you want to read about, most people just use Google Scholar.

Nearly all CS papers are posted by the authors on personal pages in PDF form.
Once you've found something that has an interested abstract just go back to
regular Google with the title, add "pdf" and it's almost certain you'll get a
link to the file.

[edit]: Also, once you've got one paper that fits squarely into an area of
interest you can then just start reading references. You'll also get a better
handle on terminology which should make your Google Scholar searches more
effective.

------
tzury
Where?

For me, _where_ is not the question, _when_ is.

My Evernote is full of 'read-later' bookmarks, which I wish I will read one
day...

------
AYBABTME
As a student, you can get heavily discounted rates to most journals.

    
    
      * For ~300$/year, I receive by mail many journals and 
        transactions from ACM.
      * For ~40$/year, I have access to some of IEEE Xplore.
    

By far, I find that ACM's papers are more interesting and I'm glad for the
300$ to get the papers in dead tree form. I'm mostly reading about Computer
Systems and Artificial Intelligence. For Xplore, I read the Software magazine,
it's ok.

Now I'm an undergrad and I don't understand 50% of what's written in those.
There's the 50% I can understand which gives me new ideas, new tools or better
understanding. For the 50% I don't grok, I know planting the seeds in my brain
will eventually lead to analogies and eventual understanding. Surely it can't
be bad to read more than less.

------
turnersr
If you want to learn about research in security and program analysis checkout:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/vrd](http://www.reddit.com/r/vrd) and
[http://www.reddit.com/r/remath](http://www.reddit.com/r/remath) .

------
bsima
For medicine and biology, Pubmed.com is a first stop. Then Nature.com

I made a Perl script that emails you daily pubmed papers based on a list of
interests, might be of use: [https://github.com/bsima/daily-
scholar](https://github.com/bsima/daily-scholar)

------
mattmaroon
This might sound like a cop out, but mostly as sources of other articles I
come across. I'm routinely shocked by how often I'll read a blog post
summarizing a paper, then read the actual paper and draw a much different
conclusion than the post that led me there.

------
yaelwrites
Science Daily ([http://www.sciencedaily.com/](http://www.sciencedaily.com/))
is a pretty good place to scan headlines, and they link to the original
sources if you wan to get to the nitty gritty.

------
Schiphol
I find the Science
([http://www.sciencemag.org/rss/podcast.xml](http://www.sciencemag.org/rss/podcast.xml))
and Nature
([http://feeds.nature.com/nature/podcast/current](http://feeds.nature.com/nature/podcast/current))
podcasts very useful. Apart from discussing the research they publish, with
their authors, they also summarize science papers appeared elsewhere. Every
week there's at least one paper I want to read in full -- I'm not saying that
I do.

------
splat
I'm a grad student in astronomy, and I try to read one paper per day, so I've
thought a bit about where to best find good papers to read. Firstly, if you
are interested in finding papers in astronomy, the best resource is the ADS
search:

[http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abstract_service.html](http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abstract_service.html)

You can search for papers any which way: by author name, by journal, by year,
or some combination. Links to the papers themselves are all on ADS. Older
papers are available for free on the journals' websites, and more recent
papers are available for free on arxiv.org.

When looking for good papers to start with, you can just search for all papers
written in a particular range of years and sort the results by the number of
times the paper has been cited. (Usually the citation count is a good
estimator of the importance of the paper.) If you search for all papers
written within a range of years, though, make sure to select the sort by
citation count option before doing your search. (Otherwise ADS will only sort
the top 200 results that it returns, which will just be the 200 authors whose
names come first alphabetically.) If you're more interested in physics than
astronomy, there's also an option to include physics papers in your search.

I would recommend browsing through the most highly cited papers of the past
decade or two. When you find one that interests you, ADS will also give you
links to all the papers that it cites, and all the papers that have cited it.
You can then sort those results by citation count to find another important,
related paper. After doing this for a while you start to read through a
network of papers in a particular field and get a grasp of how the field has
developed and what the current state of the field is.

Another good resource to find papers is review articles. The most important
journal for review articles in astronomy is Annual Reviews of Astronomy &
Astrophysics (ARA&A). Browse through their recent volumes for an article that
interests you, then skim the article. It will give you an idea of the state of
the field and will summarize all the recent, important papers in that field.
(If it's a good review article, anyway....) Some other review journals that
I've used include Reviews of Modern Physics, Living Reviews in Relativity, and
Space Science Reviews. (As a note, there are review journals in every field,
so this technique works in disciplines other than astronomy. In fact, ARA&A is
published by a group which publishes review journals in many disciplines, so
you can find many other review journals on their site. I can't speak to the
quality of those journals, though.)

An interesting journal that I like to look through every now and again, too,
is the American Journal of Physics. It's not meant to publish new physics, per
se, but is more oriented towards developing a better understanding of "solved
physics." So, for example, in the current issue, there is a paper on
explaining how magnetic traps work and another paper which provides a new
proof of Bell's inequality. Nothing truly new there, but it can help you gain
a deeper understanding of physics, and oftentimes you don't need much
background in physics or math to understand the papers.

------
Anon84
Depends on what you find interesting... Here's a frequently updated list:

[http://complexpapers.tumblr.com](http://complexpapers.tumblr.com)

of recent papers in complex systems and networks.

------
duked
It really depend on what your topic of interest is. But This is what I do and
hopefully you can apply it to any field. Identify the best academic
conferences on the topic you want (eg. CCS, NDSS, ACSAC, ESORICS, USENIX
Security, S&P for security conferences). Then look at the abstract on the
conference website and find what you think is interesting and then find the
article on the author webpages or in the conference proceedings (online for
usenix other you will find in ACM Digital library or IEEE Explorer).

------
michaelmior
Note that the same question was asked yesterday
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6659974](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6659974)

------
MidsizeBlowfish
The [http://arxiv.org/](http://arxiv.org/) is a pretty good source. You can
get an RSS feed for whichever fields you are interested in.

------
tmoertel
If you want a nice fire hose of computing papers and books, check out ACM
Computing Reviews:

[http://computingreviews.com/](http://computingreviews.com/)

------
njbooher
A bunch of prominent people in computational biology are on Twitter. I follow
them and between their tweets and things they retweet a bunch of interesting
papers show up.

~~~
johncagula
who are these people? i am interested in following...

~~~
njbooher
[https://twitter.com/lh3lh3](https://twitter.com/lh3lh3)
[https://twitter.com/aphillippy](https://twitter.com/aphillippy)
[https://twitter.com/mike_schatz](https://twitter.com/mike_schatz)
[https://twitter.com/infoecho](https://twitter.com/infoecho)
[https://twitter.com/genetics_blog](https://twitter.com/genetics_blog)
[https://twitter.com/SahaSurya](https://twitter.com/SahaSurya)
[https://twitter.com/lexnederbragt](https://twitter.com/lexnederbragt)
[https://twitter.com/pathogenomenick](https://twitter.com/pathogenomenick)

[https://twitter.com/PacBio](https://twitter.com/PacBio) is also an
interesting follow, although it's limited to stuff about their tech

------
ecesena
Conferences and surveys. Expect the firsts to contain a lot of noise and the
second ones to be quite outdated, so search for the papers in google scholar
and surf by back-references.

Imho, you should spend half a day or so going through 20-50 papers, reading
abstracts+intros+conclusions to figure out which are the most interesting and
select the 2 candidates. Especially at the beginning, focus on good/known
authors.

BTW, surveys are also quite interesting papers by themselves.

------
Jach
Do you want to go broad or deep? One strategy is to find your first paper (or
book with references) and then go through each of the papers it cites, and
each of the papers those cite, and so on. A lot of the papers probably won't
be interesting but it can be an efficient way to find quintessential papers in
a field that get cited a lot.

------
mk270
Arts and Letters Daily : [http://www.aldaily.com/](http://www.aldaily.com/)

------
jawns
A tip: Check if your local public library offers online access to academic
journals. Mine offers access to MasterFile Premier, Academic Search Complete,
GreenFile, ERIC, Medline, and a bunch of others. I used this (free) access to
do the majority of the research for "Experimenting With Babies."

------
chmielewski
There's an app for iPhone called Tech Briefcase that's good - especially to
share stuff with colleagues.

------
1wheel
For econ papers:

[http://afinetheorem.wordpress.com/](http://afinetheorem.wordpress.com/)

------
utopcell
Berkeley runs a course named "Reading the Classics" that you might enjoy if
your field of interest is Computer Science:
[http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~christos/classics/cs298.html](http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~christos/classics/cs298.html)

------
dome82
Mendeley could be a good start. :)

[http://www.mendeley.com/](http://www.mendeley.com/)

------
sethkojo
I recently got a bunch from sillysaurus2
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6345990](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6345990)).
I personally feel like he has great taste, so he's a pretty good filter for
interesting papers.

------
bowmanb
We're trying to collect all the Computer Science-related papers we can in our
GitHub repo: [https://github.com/arc90/read-and-
talk](https://github.com/arc90/read-and-talk)

Please feel free to submit a PR with more if you have!

------
bochi
There is a nice big list here:
[http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/1168/what-
papers...](http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/1168/what-papers-
should-everyone-read)

------
kirk21
3 steps:

1) Search on Google Scholar(using boolean operators)

2) Find interesting articles and read them

3) Check the references that are used in these articles. These articles might
be interesting as well.

ps: We are building a tool to write academic papers: beta.bohrresearch.com

------
betterunix
[https://eprint.iacr.org/](https://eprint.iacr.org/)

Not necessarily peer-reviewed, but most of the papers will be or have been
published in a conference or journal.

------
ducklord
I have a bunch of programming language theory papers here:
[https://github.com/jsyeo/Research-Papers](https://github.com/jsyeo/Research-
Papers).

PRs welcome.

------
dougk7
* Google Research

* Microsoft Research

* Yahoo Research

* Google Scholar

------
rargulati
Scholrly:

As of now, CS centric. Great discovery + recommendations:

[http://www.scholr.ly/](http://www.scholr.ly/)

------
galtenberg
Follow @ACMQueue and @IEEESpectrum

~~~
faizdev
Second this, ACMQueue is great for finding top notch papers, their latest
covered HFT:
[http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2536492](http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2536492)

------
d0m
For research papers on Starcraft checkout teamliquid.net.

------
askar_yu
www.academia.edu - research paper sharing portal, you can pick an area of your
interest and track from there.

------
ratonofx
i found a lot of interessting papers about crowdsourcing in academia.edu

