How to read a paper (A summary)
Yes, this is another paper in one week, but somehow I felt in order to have more tools and a better comprehension of the papers I will be reading in APAW, this one is very important. The paper is called “How to read a paper” (very intuitive?, huh) and it was written by S. Keshav from the University of Waterloo; you can find it here. This is a brief paper, therefore the summary will be, in fact, short.
The paper
Reading (let alone understanding) a paper is a very important skill that rarely is formally taught. Althought every researcher will spend hundred of hours doing so. However, the author came up with a method, where you make 3 passes by the paper.
1st Pass
The first pass is useful to know wether you will commit to the other 2 passes or let that paper alone, like a bird-eye view of it.
The steps:
- Carefully read the title, abstract and introduction
- Read the sections and subsections headings but ignore the rest
- Glance at the mathematical content, in order to see if you need more background on the subject
- Read the conclusions
- Glance over the references
You’ll be able to get the 5 C’s. i.e. Category, context, correctness, contributions and clarity of the paper.
2nd Pass
In the second pass you read the content very carefully but you ignore the details such as proofs, note the terms you dont understand or questions you may ask to the author. Check carefully the figures and graphical content and remember to mark important unread references. You should be able to summarize the content of the paper to someone else. Yay!
3rd Pass
In the third pass, in case you want to fully understand a paper, you should reimagine it. This is, making the assumptions authors made and recreate the work. This pass requires great attention to detail.
My thoughts
Time is important when it comes to read papers, because at some point you’ll have to do so with a lot of them, in a brief period of time. One must be able to determine wether a paper is worth the time or not, if one need more background in some topic before going deep into it, and wether the paper isn’t quite inside our field of research.
