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How to Read Academic Paper

1. Three-Pass Approach

Key idea: read a paper up tp 3 passes, each pass accomplishes specific goals

1.1. The First Pass

quick scan, decide whether you need to do any more passes, take about 5-10 minutes

  1. read the title and abstract, introduction carefully
  2. read section headings
  3. read the conclusions
  4. glance the references

After reading, you should get five Cs

  • category
  • context
  • correctness
  • contributions
  • clarity

1.2. The Second Pass

read the paper with greater care, but ignore the details such as proofs, take up to 1 hour,

  1. look carefully at the figures, diagrams
  2. mark relevant unread references

After this pass, able to grasp the content.

Sometimes you can not understand the paper if there are some unfamiliar terminology

1.3. The Third Pass

Key: try to virtually re-implement the paper: making the same assumptions, re-create the work

  1. identify and challenge every assumption in every statement
  2. think about how you yourself would present such a idea

This pass would take 4-5 hours for beginners.

2. Literature Survey

  1. Use an academic search such as Google Scholar, find 3-5 recent papers in the area
  • Do one pass on each paper, find a thumbnail summary of the recent work
  1. Find shared citations (key papers) and repeated author names in the bibliography.
  • Go to the websites of the key researchers an find the top conferences in that field
  1. Go to the websites of the top conferences and find high-quality related work
  • these papers and key papers constitute the first version of your survey