Here’s an immensely useful paper on the almost cliché yet rarely studied question how to read a paper, where it outlines a practical and efficient three-pass method for reading research papers.
Takeaways (of the three-pass approach):
The first pass (5-10 mins): quickly scan to get a bird’s-eye view of the whole paper.
- Carefully read the title, abstract and introduction.
- Read the headings while ignore everything else.
- Read the conclusions.
- Scan the reference and tick-off the ones you’ve already read.
Objective: to answer the five Cs (Category, Context, Correctness, Contribution, Clarity) and decide whether to dive in second pass.
The second pass (<1h): grasp the content of the paper. Become able to summarize the main thrust of the paper, with supporting evidence, to someone else.
- Read in detail, pay attention to figures, diagrams and illustrations.
- Read the paper with greater care, but ignore details such as proofs.
The third pass (1-5h or more): fully understand the paper and even virtually re-implement the paper.
- Identify and challenge every assumption in every statement.
- Think about how you yourself would present a particular idea.
“At the end of this pass, you should be able to reconstruct the entire structure of the paper from memory, as well as be able to identify its strong and weak points. In particular, you should be able to pinpoint implicit assumptions, missing citations to relevant work, and potential issues with experimental or analytical techniques.”
Relating to an ealier post about how to listen to management science talks, I think we’re gradually building up our repertoire. COOOL!
Reference
S. Keshav. 2007. How to read a paper. SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev. 37, 3 (July 2007), 83–84. https://doi.org/10.1145/1273445.1273458