Feedback from readers
Feedback from readers of 'How to read a paper'
I find it somewhat ironic that I have received more feedback on this non-technical paper than for all of my other research put together. Here is anonymized feedback from readers that may be useful to other readers.
"I am a PhD student in Economics and my biggest struggle is literature reviews. Since there is always a flood of work to review and it takes tremendous time and effort just to skim the papers I am usually lost and discouraged even in this seemingly easy stage of the research. I was telling myself I have to come up with a way to set a limit to the papers I need to read, but I was not able to stop myself from downloading papers as I encounter them. I still need to do a lot of practice with your suggested way of reviewing literature. But I already have a relief in my mind with the limit it sets to the papers to be downloaded. "
"...while I do a literature survey and I am looking for a basic principle it helps to read papers not just in my field of specialization but in other fields where the same principles are used. It brings a very different perspective and sometimes opens up new methods of thinking. "
"My comment is this; intuitively, I have been following something like the same technique for some time and have found it very useful. However, the one thing you didn't elaborate on is time-scale. I find the process works best when there is quite a large amount of time between each stage of review. For example, I find that I often collect large numbers of papers, read them (10 minute rapid first review) and then come back to them sometimes weeks later for a second pass. Finally, some further weeks or months later I return to them and find that I can extract the final useful insight that I had not done previously. (This also works really well for reading large PhD-thesis type documents).
Obviously, this might not be useful for reviewing papers under a tight deadline, but as a PhD student reading an extremely large number of papers from very diverse fields (e.g., psychology, neurology, psychoacoustics, etc), I find this very useful."
"You may also ask to print out the papers only after the first pass, if the reader select that paper for second pass. Because I have seen that many people just print out papers and through them away just after reading the abstract. I do not see any difficulty of going through first pass on the screen, without printing it out. It will save some more trees."
"In the 2.1 section "The first pass", the second "C"---Context, which is in the five "Cs", the paper says "Which other papers is it related to? Which theoretical bases were used to analyze the problem?" I am not sure if the word "which" could be used properly like this when "other papers" and "theoretical bases" are both plurals. I have tried to search the keywords of "which" combined with "is it related to" and found most of results are in the form of "Which A is it related..." where A is grammatically singular. But lots of results of "What Bs is it related to" also showed up, where Bs is plural. Would it be possibly that the word "What" instead of "Which" is the correction expression?"
"Loved it, though I have another document that I read in the past that helped me tremendously as well.
"One suggestion: the version I have (from here http://www.cs.stonybrook.edu/~vyas/teaching/CSE_592/Fall12/papers/howtoread.pdf) has an unwieldy length of 2.25 pages. From my perspective, the paper would be more accessible, especially as a reference material, if it were only 2 sides (so I can print it as one page, double-sided). Also, there is something unsatisfactory about that extra quarter side."
"However, I have some problems in the third pass. You mentioned 'to attempt to virtually re-implement the paper'. I don't quite understand the concept 'virtually'. Could you explain a little more? Also, re-implementing the work is so tough that it seems impossible. For example, how to construct the author's environment to do experiments?"
"Happy to contact through mail. It is to appreciate you for giving such a paper. Am pursuing my Ph.D i was asking many people how to write a paper.... but their answers were not fulfilling me.
i was keep on searching the net for my question. suddenly in some website i have seen the link "how to read a paper" i clicked i git your paper.. before and all i just like that read papers without any formality...but now i came to know with clear format and clarity after reading yours.
you have specified three approaches nice sir. thank you somuch... Now-a-days my view on reading the papers has been totally changed. It is worthful..
Congradulation!!!!!"
Moreover, besides Google Scholar and CiteSeer, I recommend libra.msra.cn as another way to quickly find top conferences, top papers and top institutes in a specific area. I tried it in the field of Computer Graphics, and it works well. DBLP is also a good website for academic research. It stores indices of huge numbers of papers and updates quickly.
In fact, I worked on my own version of "How to Read a Paper" on my own blo