11–20 of 44 posts
I sometimes do an exercise with my students where I give them a paper and ask them to tell me in 5 minutes what is the research question and the answer. Usually works well (if the paper is well written), and shows hem that they can get a good grasp of papers without spending hours reading them.
If papers were written better, you might not need to read them over 3 times. There should be a paper called "how to write useful headlines for your paper." "first pass" "second pass" "third pass" should be replaced with unique, useful, preferably memorable headlines. For instance: "Quick scan" "Deeper but ignore details" and "Challenge every assumption in every statement" Then you haven't wasted the attention those b…
Don't read most papers. Don't feel bad about not reading them, because in general they are terribly written.
Instead, read follow-on work which resynthesizes the ideas in these papers for a popular audience.
On the writing side of things, I really enjoyed this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_6xoMjFr70 "How to Write Papers So People Can Read Them"
In prose form: http://webarchiv.ethz.ch/digitalartweeks/web/uploads/DAWIntr...
In slide form: http://spaf.cerias.purdue.edu/classes/Popescu.pdf
I was all ready to mock this by saying how most papers get only 1) Read the abstract, 2) Read the conclusion, 3) Look at the graphics, from me. Turns out that it's basically what the paper says, but then goes into more detail about going into more detail. Worth at least a second pass :)
It's how I got through over 10,000 papers on IT and INFOSEC. When they're well-written, I could look at the abstract, a select bit of details, related work, and conclusion. Would take me about a minute or so a paper once I got good at it. Sometimes less. Some papers were more complex or just not well written where it took significantly more time to evaluate them. All in all, though, the speed reading methods save a t…
"Incidentally, when you write a paper, you can expect most reviewers (and readers) to make only one pass over it."
I understand reviewers are busy, but we depend on peer review to filter out bad or poorly-researched material. I don't think one pass is enough.
Obviously, so does the author.
I was all ready to mock this by saying how most papers get only 1) Read the abstract, 2) Read the conclusion, 3) Look at the graphics, from me. Turns out that it's basically what the paper says, but then goes into more detail about going into more detail. Worth at least a second pass :)
It's how I got through over 10,000 papers on IT and INFOSEC. When they're well-written, I could look at the abstract, a select bit of details, related work, and conclusion. Would take me about a minute or so a paper once I got good at it. Sometimes less. Some papers were more complex or just not well written where it took significantly more time to evaluate them. All in all, though, the speed reading methods save a t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's how I got through over 10,000 papers on IT and INFOSEC. When they're well-written, I could look at the abstract, a select bit of details, related work, and conclusion. Would take me about a minute or so a paper once I got good at it. Sometimes less. Some papers were more complex or just not well written where it took significantly more time to evaluate them. All in all, though, the speed reading methods save a t…
I assume you're talking about a time frame of many years.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's how I got through over 10,000 papers on IT and INFOSEC. When they're well-written, I could look at the abstract, a select bit of details, related work, and conclusion. Would take me about a minute or so a paper once I got good at it. Sometimes less. Some papers were more complex or just not well written where it took significantly more time to evaluate them. All in all, though, the speed reading methods save a t…
It typically takes much longer to actually understand the contribution of a paper in engineering fields (EE, for example). Of course, it depends on how much background you have prior to reading the paper.