It's reassuring since, having not habitually read papers, I've always wondered how (in)efficiently I read compared to readers of a professional sort.
How to Read a Paper [pdf]
21–30 of 52 posts
Re: How to Read a Paper [pdf]
#22interesting. Are there such papers - that one can check the proofs and references and etc - on IT/computing related stuff? Most papers i have stumbled upon, back in time, have been some mumbo-jumbo showing-off this or that approach or achievement, but rarely coherent or consistent (one example talks X, another talks Y, with no link inbetween). Hence i stopped reading any such papers, years ago..
I recommend visiting "the morning paper: a random walk through Computer Science research, by Adrian Colyer". It ran from 2014 to February of 2021, covering a paper per week or so. You can read Colyer's analysis first to determine if reading the paper sounds worth your time. There are also various lists of key programming/CS papers. For example, "What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic", David Goldberg's 1990 paper, includes various theorem proofs essential to understanding how IEEE floating point is defined.
Re: How to Read a Paper [pdf]
#23guess this article/approach is still useful/helpful even AI could help do a good summary... thanks for sharing...
IMNSHO, asking AI to summarize a paper is a flavor of what Umberto Eco terms the "alibi of photocopies", where he says, "There are many things that I do not know because I photocopied a text and then relaxed as if I had read it." Today I would write "There are many things that I do not know because I asked an LLM to summarize a text and then relaxed as if I had read it."
Re: How to Read a Paper [pdf]
#24I don't really agree with such advice. The only important thing is to read (or skim) many papers in the relevant field. Initially they will be hard to understand as they are full of difficult jargon. But after a while, you will notice the jargon that repeats across articles, be able to look it up, and ultimately understand more and more. After a while it will be fairly easy. But there is no general "paper reading abi…
In the case of science and math words are more than just jargon, they have precise meaning. Often jargon contains ambiguity but you can infer a general meaning. With the language of math and science you actually need to read the precise definition of a term to understand its meaning.
Re: How to Read a Paper [pdf]
#25I give all my doctoral students a copy of the following great paper (and I've used a variant of the check list at the end for years - avoids errors when working on multiple papers with multiple international teams in parallel): How to Write a Paper http://www-mech.eng.cam.ac.uk/mmd/ashby-paper-V6.pdf
The moment I saw Figures 3 and 4, I knew this paper would not be useful for me at all. The author of the paper is likely a visual thinker type of person, whereas I am certainly not. The boxes, colors, shading, etc. on those figures would/does easily overwhelm me.
I find simply writing an outline, section titles and introductory paragraphs, and iterating over and over much more suitable to get started with writing a paper.
Re: How to Read a Paper [pdf]
#26Re: How to Read a Paper [pdf]
#27I used to write research at Goldman. Our chief economist would often give this book as an end-of-year gift. I found it useful in my writing: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/E/bo256745...
Re: How to Read a Paper [pdf]
#28I think the time estimates depend heavily on the field. A mathematician recently told him that it would take him 1-2 weeks (with nothing else to do in that time) to digest a paper outside his main area.
Makes me wonder: should it, though? The author of the paper presumably had gone through the trouble of understanding everything described in the paper, built intuition and a mental model. Instead of putting more effort in writing the latter down, it appears to me that authors are inclined to throw the proverbial baby out with the bath water: they spend more time writing out the dense proof rather than an exposition.
I'm not saying proof isn't important or to exclude it. But given that more people understand plain and intuitive explanation (at the expense of accuracy, maybe), their hard work reaches broader audience that way. Isn't that what authors want, instead of "dog whistling"? Do proofs alone carry intuition? I don't think so.
Re: How to Read a Paper [pdf]
#29I give all my doctoral students a copy of the following great paper (and I've used a variant of the check list at the end for years - avoids errors when working on multiple papers with multiple international teams in parallel): How to Write a Paper http://www-mech.eng.cam.ac.uk/mmd/ashby-paper-V6.pdf
This may get downvoted, but regarding to writing a thesis:
If I open a thesis and see it was done in Latex I always think this guy can't be an idiot.
Re: How to Read a Paper [pdf]
#30My advisor gave me this paper at the beginning of my PhD; useful advice especially when google scholar dumps heaps of papers onto you every so often. Though I'd largely ignore the time estimates. That varies deeply depending on the paper and field.