How I read a research paper
https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2013/07/how-i-read-researc...
How to Read a Paper [pdf]
31–40 of 52 posts
Re: How to Read a Paper [pdf]
#32I 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.
That's an interesting prior. Can you expand on it?
If it's because of managing latex's complexity indicating some kind of ability, I can guarantee you that most people just copy paste and tweak stuff till it works.
Re: How to Read a Paper [pdf]
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That's an interesting prior. Can you expand on it? If it's because of managing latex's complexity indicating some kind of ability, I can guarantee you that most people just copy paste and tweak stuff till it works.
How am I supposed to know? I am sure there are excellent works from the STEM field written in word. But someone using latex has to at least some understanding of IT which is a good thing. Latex gives just a good first impression.
Based on former fellow students, I knew many would just stick to what they are fed and never get the idea to acquire knowledge on their own. And Latex could be just one of the things that shows curiosity and independent knowledge acquisition.
Re: How to Read a Paper [pdf]
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That's an interesting prior. Can you expand on it? If it's because of managing latex's complexity indicating some kind of ability, I can guarantee you that most people just copy paste and tweak stuff till it works.
I think the refrain: “Never judge a book by it’s cover” applies here.
Our brains tend to associate good looking with well-researched when this isn’t always the case, hence the refrain quoted above.
So, if someone goes through the trouble of using a cumbersome typesetting tool like Latex to format a paper, perhaps they have made an important contribution that is worth setting aside 15-30 mins of your time to digest the thesis in its entirety.
Re: How to Read a Paper [pdf]
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That's an interesting prior. Can you expand on it? If it's because of managing latex's complexity indicating some kind of ability, I can guarantee you that most people just copy paste and tweak stuff till it works.
In 2023, there's a good chance it was written in markdown and converted to latex anyway, so there's not even copy/paste going on.
Re: How to Read a Paper [pdf]
#36I 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.
Hah, I formatted by girlfriend's thesis in Latex, I was so annoyed at the whole process that I did mine in MS Word.
Re: How to Read a Paper [pdf]
#37But how do you read "How to Read a Paper"?
Re: How to Read a Paper [pdf]
#38interesting. 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 Arithmeti…
Forgot the link: https://blog.acolyer.org/archives/
Re: How to Read a Paper [pdf]
#39I 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.…
It takes many dozens of hours, sometimes hundreds, to write a paper (just the writing not the technical work). People will spend a long time trying to improve the expositions. I have seen papers where co-authors have fought for weeks about the accuracy of a single sentence. I have seen papers where there were over twenty draft-revision cycles.
But there are natural limits. Usually, after working for years on a problem, you become so close to it that describing to a general technical audience is very difficult. Often, after you publish the work, someone else will do the difficult work of understanding your paper, and then write a more readable exposition as part of a review paper or book.
Re: How to Read a Paper [pdf]
#40"The first version of this document was drafted by my students: …" So why aren't they listed as co-authors? :-)
They're in the "Acknowledgements" section, which is appropriate for this particular scheme of things. Academia is nothing if not a "street cred" game, and that cred is not portioned out easily (or equitably).