Practice. And take it easy at first. I started reading them in the bathroom :).
How to read research paper, textbook, long text content?
21–30 of 89 posts
Re: How to read research paper, textbook, long text content?
#22The secret sauce is to read slowly and not care about where you are in the paper. It’s the same with marathon running. If you keep thinking that you haven’t made much progress you’re quickly going to give up. What matters is progress. And then, out of nowhere, you’ll have read that paper. The more you do that the faster you’ll get.
Re: How to read research paper, textbook, long text content?
#23One should understand that not all processes in life take 45 minutes. Learning meaningful content is like going to the gym or playing the piano - you cannot expect to see any meaningful results in a day. You'll have to put in the work for a very long time, but you'll get better at it as you go. Analogy aside, not all text is written to be read in a 45 min session. Set your mind that reading and absorbing content from…
It should not take someone a week to read a research paper. Depending on the paper maybe a day but usually a few hours. Carefully studying it is something else and that might take a week, but not every paper needs that kind of attention and it's a valuable skill to learn skimming and differentiating between un-/valuable and un-/interesting papers.
> It should not take someone a week to read a research paper
Either you have never read a research paper, or you are gifted, or you have been doing that for so long in your field that you forgot how hard it can be when you start.
Re: How to read research paper, textbook, long text content?
#24If you’re in university your school probably offers student development classes. One or more of them should cover study habits.
You could also consider talking to a mental health professional. I can’t diagnose you, but a few things you mentioned make me wonder if you may have a mild form of one of these:
* ADHD
* Dyslexia
* Internet Addiction
Re: How to read research paper, textbook, long text content?
#25Another comment mentions the possibility of a reading disorder. Since you have a pretty good measure of "45 minutes to read/comprehend 3 paragraphs", have you tried text-to-speech and seeing if you're faster that way?
Or maybe reformatting the text with layout, font, font-sizes that work better for you?
Not suggesting either solves the problem, but the small experiments might help identify an issue.
I have also had problems understanding some research papers, but the example one you linked is pretty straightforward to me. Reading the whole paper would take me some time, but not 45 minutes for 3 typical paragraphs. And I'm not that great at it. That's why I'm seconding the idea that maybe dyslexia or something similar is in play here.
Re: How to read research paper, textbook, long text content?
#26Note that the paper you referred to is relatively dense. It should take a while to fully comprehend all of the details.
That said, sometimes you don’t need to comprehend all of the details. In those cases, use reading strategies that will let you tease out the main points quickly. Other folks in this thread have pointed to some good sources, so I won’t repeat them here.
Best of luck!
Re: How to read research paper, textbook, long text content?
#27Research papers demand more read-throughs compared to other genres. My fellow grad students had their own reading styles, but I think my approach was fairly typical:
- Review: amass several papers related to the topic, either through search (e.g. Google Scholar) or through a survey paper on the topic.
- Filter: read the abstracts and decide which papers are worth skimming.
- Skim: read the introduction, skim the figures and their captions, and conclusion. This step is another filter; ask yourself whether diving into the technical minutia is worth it.
- Read: read the paper in-depth, taking notes in your manner of choice (which seems to be slides for OP).
- Reread: read and skim the paper a few more times until you could summarize it to someone else. Divorce yourself from the paper by reading other papers, and revisit it to contextualize its contribution.
Re: How to read research paper, textbook, long text content?
#28For non-fiction, I almost never read every word in order, from start to finish. I think about what question I want to answer, and how I can get that answer quickly. The table of contents tells you how the book is organized, and the index shows you what's in it. I usually look at those first, then flip to the parts I want to know about and read them.
For research papers, I almost always start by reading the abstract and the conclusion, then reading related sections to answer questions I have about that. I'm not editing papers, or checking their validity: I just want to know what they're going on about.
Another thing is to ask whether you're reading the right document. For that GFS paper, I wonder if it's the right place to start learning about GFS. Ideally, you'd come to it with enough knowledge already that you don't need puzzle over every word. Are there introductory explanations? Youtube videos? Go over those first and come back later, and the paper probably won't be as cryptic.
For fiction, the best advice I ever got from an English professor, which changed my relationship with books, is this: if you don't like it, and nobody is making you read it, then stop reading it. Read something you can't put down instead.
In general, I think you haven't actually read something until you've read it twice. So, read it through once quickly, to get the idea, then read it again more slowly to understand it.
Re: How to read research paper, textbook, long text content?
#29I am a scientist and I have to read sometimes hundreds of pages of dense scientific literature in a given week while doing other things that my job requires. I also find reading long difficult text to be hard. However, over the years I found two things that allowed me to get better at it:
1. Just read A LOT. There is no way around it. If you push yourself to do this, eventually your mind will figure out a way.
2. Markup the text you are reading. I do this on an iPad with a stylus. I underline key points, circle important paragraphs, jot down a quick summary of lengthy thoughts.
Good luck!
Re: How to read research paper, textbook, long text content?
#30There are books are “smooth” readings. Page-turner as they say. And then there are other books that one feels like one is wrestling with the author. An example of the first category for me is “The C Programming Language” it’s a great read, beautiful writing even if you’re not interested in C. An example of the second category is “The Power of Habit”. I couldn’t finish it. The parts that I read could have been said in a paragraph or two but that would have resulted in an article and not a book; no gain in that, is there, sometimes I wonder.