how to read a paper

1. INTRODUCTION

reasons of papers:keep current in their field;literature survey of a new field.

2. THE THREE-PASS APPROACH

Don't start at the beginning and plow your way to the end.

Each pass accomplishes specific goals and builds upon the previous pass.

 

The first pass gives you a general idea about the paper.

The second pass lets you grasp the paper's content, but not its details.

The third pass helps you understand the paper in depth.

 

2.1 The first pass:a quick scan to get a bird's-eye view of the paper.

1. Carefully read the title, abstract, and introduction

2. Read the section and sub-section headings, but ignore everything else

3. Glance at the mathematical content (if any) to determine the underlying theoretical foundations

4. Read the conclusions

5. Glance over the references, mentally ticking off the ones you've already read

1. Category: What type of paper is this? A measurement paper? An analysis of an existing system? A description of a research prototype?

2. Context: Which other papers is it related to? Which theoretical bases were used to analyze the problem?

3. Correctness: Do the assumptions appear to be valid?

4. Contributions: What are the paper's main contributions?

5. Clarity: Is the paper well written?

does the paper interest you?

do you know enough about the area to understand the paper?

do the authors make invalid assumptions?

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

Take care to choose coherent section and sub-section titles and to write concise and comprehensive abstracts.

If a reviewer cannot understand the gist after one pass, the paper will likely be rejected; if a reader cannot understand the highlights of the paper after five minutes, the paper will likely never be read.

2.2 The second pass：read the paper with greater care, but ignore details such as proofs.

1. Look carefully at the figures, diagrams and other illustrations in the paper. Pay special attention to graphs. Are the axes properly labeled? Are results shown with error bars, so that conclusions are statistically significant? Common mistakes like these will separate rushed, shoddy work from the truly excellent.

2. Remember to mark relevant unread references for further reading (this is a good way to learn more about the background of the paper).

You should be able to grasp the content of the paper.

You should be able to summarize the main thrust of the paper, with supporting evidence, to someone else.

This level of detail is appropriate for a paper in which you are interested, but does not lie in your research speciality.

This may be because the subject matter is new to you, with unfamiliar terminology and acronyms.

Or the authors may use a proof or experimental technique that you don't understand, so that the bulk of the paper is incomprehensible.

The paper may be poorly written with unsubstantiated assertions and numerous forward references.

Or it could just be that it's late at night and you're tired.

set the paper aside, hoping you don't need to understand the material to be successful in your career

return to the paper later, perhaps after reading background material

persevere and go on to the third pass

2.3 The third pass：attempt to virtually re-implement the paper

By comparing this re-creation with the actual paper, you can easily identify not only a paper's innovations, but also its hidden failings and assumptions.

You should identify and challenge every assumption in every statement.

Moreover, you should think about how you yourself would present a particular idea.

This comparison of the actual with the virtual lends a sharp insight into the proof and presentation techniques in the paper and you can very likely add this to your repertoire of tools.

During this pass, you should also jot down ideas for future work.

At the end of this pass, you should be able to reconstruct the entire structure of the paper from memory, as well as be able to identify its strong and weak points.

In particular, you should be able to pinpoint implicit assumptions, missing citations to relevant work, and potential issues with experimental or analytical techniques.

3. DOING A LITERATURE SURVEY

Paper reading skills are put to the test in doing a literature survey.

Do one pass on each paper to get a sense of the work, then read their related work sections.

You will find a thumbnail summary of the recent work, and perhaps, if you are lucky, a pointer to a recent survey paper.

If you can find such a survey, you are done. Read the survey, congratulating yourself on your good luck.

Download the key papers and set them aside. Then go to the websites of the key researchers and see where they've published recently. That will help you identify the top conferences in that field because the best researchers usually publish in the top conferences.

A quick scan will usually identify recent high-quality related work. These papers, along with the ones you set aside earlier, constitute the first version of your survey.

Make two passes through these papers. If they all cite a key paper that you did not find earlier, obtain and read it, iterating as necessary.

4. BENEFITS

This disciplined approach prevents me from drowning in the details before getting a bird's-eye-view.

5. RELATEDWORK

If you are reading a paper to do a review, you should also read Timothy Roscoe's paper on “Writing reviews for systems conferences” [3].

If you're planning to write a technical paper, you should refer both to Henning Schulzrinne's comprehensive web site [4] and George Whitesides's excellent overview of the process [5].

Finally, Simon Peyton Jones has a website that covers the entire spectrum of research skills [2].

Iain H. McLean of Psychology, Inc. has put together a downloadable‘review matrix’ that simplifies paper reviewing using the three-pass approach for papers in experimental psychology[1], which can probably be used, with minor modifications, for papers in other areas.

 

8. REFERENCES

[1] I.H. McLean, “Literature Review Matrix,” http://psychologyinc.blogspot.com/

[2] S. Peyton Jones, “Research Skills,” http://research.microsoft.com/enus/um/people/simonpj/papers/giving-a-talk/giving-atalk.htm.

[3] T. Roscoe, “Writing Reviews for Systems Conferences,” http://people.inf.ethz.ch/troscoe/pubs/reviewwriting.pdf.

[4] H. Schulzrinne, “Writing Technical Articles,” http://www.cs.columbia.edu/∼hgs/etc/writingstyle.html.

[5] G.M. Whitesides, “Whitesides’ Group: Writing a Paper,” http://www.che.iitm.ac.in/misc/dd/writepaper.pdf.

• The third step is to go to the website for these top conferences and look through their recent proceedings.
• Otherwise, in the second step, find shared citations and repeated author names in the bibliography. These are the key papers and researchers in that area.
• First, use an academic search engine such as Google Scholar or CiteSeer and some well-chosen keywords to find three to five recent papers in the area.
• You can now choose to:
• Sometimes you won’t understand a paper even at the end of the second pass：
• After this pass:
•  two steps in this pass:(<60 min)
• how to write a paper:
• decide whether to read further:
• answer the five Cs at the end of the first pass:
•  five steps in this pass:(5-10 min)