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How to read research paper, textbook, long text content?

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Re: How to read research paper, textbook, long text content?

#41

Post by N1H1L »

For journal papers I get you completely dude. I am a PhD, and now a research scientist. Reading and writing journal papers is what I have been doing for close to a decade now - and yet to really get a paper - I often have to dedicate two-three days to that paper.

Many people in my field say that they have read a paper, but from my experience all they have done is read the abstract and the figure captions. That's not reading a paper.

Think of it this way - the work in the paper often took several months, and then a few more months to write, revise and polish it. It literally condenses one to two man-years worth of acquired knowledge in 10 pages - it should not shame you then that it takes a few days for you to digest it all.

Re: How to read research paper, textbook, long text content?

#42

Post by jll29 »

psychomugs wrote: post #27

Research 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 figu…

I upvoted the parent, and I would add another important step, namely:

- Compare: read similar papers (such as papers trying to solve the same problem both before and after the current paper) to get a sense of the whole space and range of methods tried to date. Also, look what later papers say about the paper under scrutiny.

Finally, reflect on how the various papers found in the 'Gather' phase related to each other: do they refine each other, refute, supersede etc.?

Re: How to read research paper, textbook, long text content?

#43

Post by LaserPineapple »

michael_nielsen wrote: post #33
awild wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Right - if the paper is really good, it might take a few years to understand. Most papers can be read in I'm caricaturing, but only a tiny bit, this is how I read. And for good stuff, that I want to understand, a page an hour is (often) pretty typical for my first fairly thorough read. I've written two textbooks, and in both cases I thought of the book as the distilled outcome from reading about a dozen very importan…

Can you say more about this? What accounts for the difference in time spent on a pretty good vs a very good paper? Is it that you find the material in a very good paper more worthwhile, and thus are willing to expend more effort to understand it?

Re: How to read research paper, textbook, long text content?

#44

Post by atty »

fedorova wrote: post #29

I 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. Mar…

Full agree on both points. I’d also add that if the papers are in any true experimental science field, a baseline understanding of probability and statistics will be necessary for the reader to really understand the results. For CS or theory papers, generally that is less or not necessary.

Re: How to read research paper, textbook, long text content?

#46

Post by zoomablemind »

> ...But I have issue with reading huge huge texts as you know in this case it will require too much time when I do this. Is there way to simplify this reading style?

I'd suggest you to start with figuring out why you need to face all that reading.

Is it to comply with some external requirement or is it motivated by your own need to find the knowledge?

Look at any printed material as some surrogate of a conversation. In fact most of books and papers are structured just for that. Abstracts are supposed to give an overview of context and touch on results. Conclusions are supposed to condense and underscore the findings. So reading papers is one way to learn how others solve(d) problems that may be similar to yours.

With books it may be harder to carve your pathway according to interest, as often the narrative may be progressive and assuming some degree of prior knowledge.

If you seem to blank on too many paragraphs and if you find it hard to paraphrase a passage, perhaps the material is too advanced for you at present. Mind that often papers do not show all intermediate details, simply mention them in passing or naming some stat package used. Well, take a note but treat that as some 'magic' box which turns to be some accepted practice. At the end the results should be summarized in plain language.

Re: How to read research paper, textbook, long text content?

#48

Post by tucaz »

pyuser583 wrote: post #39

I strongly suggest “How to Read a Book” by Adler. It’s an excellent discussion of types and levels of reading. When faced with a large, imposing text, my method is: 1. Read the title page, table of contents, index, and introduction several times. This should make it clear what the book is about and how it’s structure. 2. Read it straight through from start to end. No notes. Don’t worry about not understanding. Intell…

I second the suggestion. Never thought I would read a book so meta, but I did and it was worth it.

Re: How to read research paper, textbook, long text content?

#49

Post by spidersouris »

baby wrote: post #23
awild wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Before arguing for or against this statement, perhaps we should precise what kind of research papers we're talking about. We're on HN, so I know most comments of this thread are dealing with scientific research papers; I'm a student in humanities myself, so I've never taken the time to analyze such papers and I am thus unable to defend or counter OP's claim on this particular question. However, their comment applies quite well to humanities. Except if you're totally unfamiliar with the subject, reading or understanding a humanitarian paper whether it be about linguistics, literature, history or whatnot should not take a week. Most papers are 20-page long and one day is far enough to analyze them. Some may take a bit longer, let's say a few days, if you want to catch and extract their very substance, but never much more than that. Counterexamples are welcomed.

Re: How to read research paper, textbook, long text content?

#50

Post by a_e_k »

psychomugs wrote: post #27

Research 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 figu…

That's pretty close to my approach. I'd suggest not just limiting yourself to just the initial set of papers amassed in your "Review" step, though. Feel free to add new papers to your queue at any time if you come across an interesting term or citation. It's okay for this to be a breadth-first search.
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