Summary of How to Read a Paper

A ‘three-pass’ approach to read paper

This is a copy and some summary of Paper “How to Read a Paper” written by S. Keshav. The key idea is that you should read the paper in up to three passes, instead of starting at the beginning and plowing your way to the end.

The intuitive of the this approach:

• First: get a general idea about the paper.
• Second: grasp the paper’s content but not its details.
• Third: undrestand the paper in depth.

We call these three points as “three-pass”, since we need to finish them one by one to “pass it”.

First Pass

A quick scan to get a bird’s-eye view of the paper. The following four steps will spend 5 to 10 minutes.

1. Carefully read the title, abstract, and introduction
2. Read the section and sub-section headings, but ignore everything else
3. Read the conclusions
4. Glance over the references, mentally ticking off the ones you’ve already read

Our goal in this step is to answer the five Cs:

1. Category: What type of paper is this? A measurement paper? An analysis of an existing system? Adescription of a research prototype?
2. Context: Which other papers is it related to? Which theoretical bases were used to analyze the problem?
3. Correctness: Dothe assumptions appear to be valid?
4. Contributions: What are the paper’s main contributions?
5. Clarity: Is the paper well written?

You may dropout this paper after this step if the paper doesn’t interest you. The first pass is adequate for papers that aren’t in your research area, but may someday prove relevant.

Incidentally, we should expect most reviewers to make only one pass over ourself paper.

Second Pass

Read the paper with greater care, but ignore details such as proofs.

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

The above should take up to an hour. 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.

Third Pass

Yo fully understand a paper, particularly if your are reviewer, reuires a third pass. The key to the third pass is to attempt to virtually reimplement the paper: that is, making the same assumptions as the authors, recreate the work. By comparing this recreation 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, your 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.

This pass can take about four or five hours for beginners, and about an hour for an experienced reader. At the end of this pass, you should be able to reconstruct the entire 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.