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How to Read a Paper
Read the paper in three passes, each more detailed than the last
First pass
- Read the abstract, introduction, headings (alone), conclusion and look for any references you might have read before
- This should only take you about 5 mins
- Decide if this paper is worth reading further?
- If you write a paper expect that most readers will only do this. So tailoring to this might help.
Second pass
- Now read the content. Leave out dense stuff like proofs
- Note down all the words you didn’t understand
- Note down questions you might ask the author
- Check if the graphs and tables are accurate
- Have a reading list and add any references you might have found interesting to that
Third pass
- This will take a lot of time. Try to re-implement the paper. Assume you are in the authors shoes and try to implement it. You can find out novelties and weakness of the paper this way
How to do a literature survey
- Go to a academic paper indexer like Scholar and find the top 5 most cited papers in your domain
- Start from that. See if you can find any good survey papers that were authored recently
- If not start from the references and citations