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How to Read a Paper

S.Keshav

The author developed an efficient approach to read and digest research papers. Giving a protocol to follow when running a survey or exploring papers: the Three-pass approach.

Each pass accomplishes specific goals and builds upon the previous pass: The first pass gives you a general idea about the paper. The second pass lets you grasp the paper's content, but not its details. The third pass helps you understand the paper in depth.

The first pass

The first pass is a quick scan to get a bird's-eye view of the paper. Here you can decide if the papers is relevant or not.

  1. Carefully read the title, abstract, and introduction
  2. Read the section and sub-section headings, but ignore everything else
  3. Read the conclusions
  4. Glance over the references, mentally ticking off the ones you've already read.

At the end of the first pass, you should be able to answer the five Cs:

  1. Category: What type of paper is this? A measurement paper? An analysis of an existing system? A description of a research prototype?
  2. Context: Which other papers is it related to? Which theoretical bases were used to analyze the problem?
  3. Correctness: Do the assumptions appear to be valid?
  4. Contributions: What are the paper's main contributions?
  5. Clarity: Is the paper well written?

This first pass is what most reviewers and readers will do in order to decide if your paper is relevant or not. So take extra care to deliver it in the best way possible.

My version of it

To me, some Cs doesn't mean much. I like to think about the first pass as an initial way to briefly describe the paper to someone. So, in that sense, after the first pass, instead of answering the five Cs, we can write a single paragraph stating:

  • What is the paper main problem
  • What is the paper suggested solution
  • What is the paper main contributions

The second pass

In the second pass, read the paper with greater care, making comments and highlighting key points.

  1. Look carefully at the figures, diagrams and other illustrations in the paper. Pay special attention to graphs. Are the axes properly labeled? Are results shown with error bars, so that conclusions are statistically significant? Common mistakes like these will separate rushed, shoddy work from the truly excellent.
  2. Remember to mark relevant unread references for further reading (this is a good way to learn more about the background of the paper).

Now you should be able to grasp the content of the paper. But sometimes you won't understand a paper even at the end of this second pass. This may be because the subject matter is new to you, the authors may use a proof or experimental technique that you don't understand, it could be poorly written or maybe you are just tired and it is already late at night.

Either way you can now choose to:

  • a) set the paper aside, hoping you don't need to understand the material.
  • b) return to the paper later, perhaps after reading background material.
  • c) persevere and go on to the third pass.

The third pass

This pass is to fully understand a paper. The key to the third pass is to attempt to virtually re-implement the paper: that is, making the same assumptions as the authors, re-create the work. By comparing this re-creation with the actual paper, you can easily identify not only a paper's innovations, but also its hidden failings and assumptions.

This pass requires great attention to detail. You should identify and challenge every assumption in every statement. During this pass, you should also jot down ideas for future work.

At the end of it, 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.

Doing a literature survey

  1. Academic search engine and well-chosen keywords to find three to five recent papers in the area.
  2. Do one pass on each paper to get a sense of the work, then read their related work sections.
  3. Find shared citations and repeated author names in the bibliography - These are the key papers and researchers in that area - Download the key papers and set them aside.
  4. Go to the websites of the key researchers and see where they've published recently. That will help you identify the top conferences.
  5. Go to the website for these top conferences and look through their recent proceedings.
  6. Scan it to identify recent high-quality related work.

These papers represent the first version of the survey.

T. Roscoe, “Writing Reviews for Systems Conferences,” http://people.inf.ethz.ch/troscoe/pubs/review-writing.pdf.

H. Schulzrinne, “Writing Technical Articles,” http://www.cs.columbia.edu/hgs/etc/writing-style.html.

G.M. Whitesides, “Whitesides’ Group: Writing a Paper,” http://www.che.iitm.ac.in/misc/dd/writepaper.pdf.