Getting Better at Understanding Academic Papers: A Brief Guide for Beginners

https://habr.com/en/company/spbifmo/blog/517418/

64 12 6 years ago

i can’t recommend Kerav (2016) enough.

ABSTRACT

Researchers spend a great deal of time reading research papers. However, this skill is rarely taught, leading to much wasted effort. This article outlines a practical and efficient three-pass method for reading research papers. I also describe how to use this method to do a literature survey.

https://web.stanford.edu/class/ee384m/Handouts/HowtoReadPape...

josephby• 6 years ago

He’s also put up a page with translations into Chinese, French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Persian and Turkish and a handy matrix at https://svr-sk818-web.cl.cam.ac.uk/keshav/wiki/index.php/HTR...

srtjstjsj3• 6 years ago

Why do people still publish in the terrible 2-column format as though their readers are going to print the document on A4/letter paper?

PudgePacket• 6 years ago

For further reading see "Studying Studies" https://peterattiamd.com/ns001/.

didericis• 6 years ago

The importance of looking up words you’re unfamiliar with is mentioned in part 2, and unfamiliarity with advanced terminology seems like it’s usually the primary blocker for understanding a paper. At least it usually is for me.

When I try to understand a paper with a lot of terminology I’m new to, I try to translate it into more colloquial, but still precise language.

It’d be cool of there was some sort of software/way authors could add citations for advanced terms that could then be used to “decompress” the paper into an easier to understand but longer version of it. Then they could still write efficiently/describe the paper in the terms they use when working, and people without that context could automatically translate it into something more understandable.

Would also be cool if you could use something like that to measure how many “external dependencies” your paper has so you can then try to minimize them/get rid of unessential ones more easily.

dls20162• 6 years ago

Leslie Lamport described a writing system like this but I can’t find a reference.

dls20162• 6 years ago

Found it: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/how-to-...

throwaway_pdp09• 6 years ago

Some tech papers are just badly written.

mncharity• 6 years ago

"How to (seriously) read a scientific paper" https://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2016/03/how-seriously-rea...

srtjstjsj3• 6 years ago

This makes me sad. Why aren't the professionals getting better at writing scientific papers? It's such a waste of effort to do all the research and then fail at writing it up.

djaque• 6 years ago

Scientists have been getting by pretty well for all of the "writing failure" that you're claiming.

I'm guessing that you think scientific papers are bad because you have a hard time reading them. In reality, you were probably never the intended audience. They're designed for another experienced researcher in the same field.

You can't cram a year's worth of highly specialized research into three pages without it becoming incredibly dense.

srtjstjsj3• 6 years ago

There's not much here, but what little there is is in part 2 https://m.habr.com/en/company/spbifmo/blog/517808/

Getting Better at Understanding Academic Papers: A Brief Guide for Beginners

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