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How to Read a Paper (2016) [pdf]

blizzard.cs.uwaterloo.ca

31–40 of 44 posts

Re: How to Read a Paper (2016) [pdf]

#31

This part was most interesting to me: "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.

Indeed, but then this is somewhat to be expected when the peer review process itself doesn't have much in the way of incentives for the reviewers. Journals ask reviewers to voluntarily put their own work on hold for a potentially non-trivial period of time to grok a non-stop fire hose of papers, just so their and the original authors' efforts end up buried under a mountain of other research behind some absurdly expensive paywall later. And if you regularly slip up on deadlines or opt not to play along with these requests for some reason or another, good luck maintaining good relations with that journal in the future for your own papers.

Morals and civic duty aside, it's hard to blame reviewers for skimming or 'phoning it in' under such conditions. With all these subtle politics and screwy incentive structures, I'm unfortunately not surprised at all that science is having a replication crisis.

Re: How to Read a Paper (2016) [pdf]

#33
I thought that was going to be Trisha Greenhalgh's How to Read a Paper: https://www.amazon.com/How-Read-Paper-Evidence-Based-Medicin...

Superficially the same idea, but it is for advising medical practitioners on how to apply research to their work. It goes about this by showing you how to find research, critique it, analyse it, use meta-research, and so on.

For somebody not in medicine, it had some transferable advice on how to use research in practice, but was mainly a detailed insight into how evidence-based medicine works. Highly recommended.

Re: How to Read a Paper (2016) [pdf]

#34
post #18

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.

If you've ever read a STEM textbook that gives references, you'll often find an entire paper or PhD thesis condensed into a sentence...

Re: How to Read a Paper (2016) [pdf]

#37
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The background accumulates as you thoroughly read them. You can understand a lot without knowing all the specifics. The good papers will usually explain the challenges, approaches so far, their weaknesses, their solution, and future work that's essentially the solution's weaknesses. One can get pretty far with that. Even formal verification papers were easy to follow on general idea of their methods or results withou…

True, but reading the intro and background/prior work sections takes approx. 5-10 minutes. And depending on the length of the paper, these sections may be pretty succinct and therefore not very helpful to a reader unfamiliar with the state of the art. I agree. You can usually understand the general contributions and how they work at a high level pretty easily. But intuitively and deeply understanding a paper takes mu…

I think you're correct in your intuition.

I recall watching a recent talk by Andrew Ng who mentioned that reading research papers is a key method in improving as deep learning specialist / data scientist, but that one should temper their expectations of knowledge acquisition. One might spend a Sunday trying to go deep into a paper, but at the end of the weekend that person may barely get much out of it. He even admits that sometimes it takes him a couple reads over a course of several sessions to fully grasp a new concept. Which isn't all that surprising given the information asymmetry between the authors and the reader.

Re: How to Read a Paper (2016) [pdf]

#38

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 :)

This is the first phase of syntopical reading discussed in "How to read a book", which is a great book about reading other (mostly nonfiction) books.

I was about to mention the same book and the same idea out of that book. It's written by Adler and van Doren.

Re: How to Read a Paper (2016) [pdf]

#39

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 :)

This is the first phase of syntopical reading discussed in "How to read a book", which is a great book about reading other (mostly nonfiction) books.

[deleted]

Re: How to Read a Paper (2016) [pdf]

#40
post #14

I'd like to present a fourth option, the "0-pass": 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.

Agreed. Most research papers are a headache to read, even in a field you are familiar with. The full list of reasons is here: http://www.wikipaper.org/p/Why_So_Difficult The site above ^^ has not launched yet, but should help alleviate the problem.

The site has launched far enough to attract spammers. It looks like you've got some cleaning and monitoring to do:

http://www.wikipaper.org/p/Special:AllPages

Bookmarked your site, looks interesting for this non-academic.

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