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| | Ask HN: How do you read Academic Papers? | |
140 points by milesf on March 22, 2015 | hide | past | favorite | 71 comments |
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| I have never really consciously taken the time to learn how to read academic papers, because it never occurred to me it's something I needed. I replied to a tweet today suggesting people ought to take a course how to read them, and got a great reply from Glenn Vanderberg on a starting point: https://twitter.com/glv/status/579411305347489792 Does anyone else have any thoughts or opinions about this? I have a hard time learning things. Maybe this insight is part of the reason why. |
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* Print the paper out and make notes on it by hand (this has a small mention in one of the articles) - this technique got me through university, I tried every software package imaginable but in the end having a hard copy forced me to deal with sheer amount of reading I had to do. It also allowed me to freely make notes, add sticky notes etc. Since then I have done this with any collection of papers I want to get my head around.
* Try to comprehend something on every read through - it doesn't have to be big, just something - whether it is the sample makeup or part of the methodology or the conclusions etc. You don't need to understand these in any particular order, but ensure to revise your understanding as you become more familiar with the paper.
* Most papers are useless (to you at the time you are reading them) - the sad truth about research is that 90% of the stuff you devote yourself to understanding will be wrong, outdated or not useful to what you are working on. It is very hard to pick out useful papers with nothing to go on but titles, and abstract and citations. As you get more used to the field it becomes easier and familiar names, authors and institutions can guide you, but even close to a decade after reading my first paper I still probably only manage a 10% hit rate when conducting research (but hey - 10% of a lot of papers is still a lot of papers!)