As a researcher myself, reading papers are one part of the job. Although there are some resources and materials present ways to read papers, sometimes I still don’t feel that they are pracitical and cannot help me digest the papers properly.
Before going further, I need to recommend the book ” How to read a book”1. I know this is cliche and any blogger would have already recommend it. While reading it, I actually hated it. But that is the beauty of classical transcending knowledge, you start to appreciate it once you start to use it day in and day out. I still remembered it argues that readers should pay attention even to the title of the book with the title “The rise and fall of the Roman Empire”, many readers would ignore the rise part, which could cause lots of issues. So the first most importa nt principle is: Attention is crucial. If you want to learn just one thing from this article, please take this one.
You need to decide what your goals are, I believe most people want to replicate results from scratch at least starting solely from papers. So in this article, we are not talking about methods like 3 passes, or skimming through a paper, we want to manifest the research starting from the papers.
Suppose we read the paper with semi-criticism to ourselves, meaning we allow us to jump/skip when we don’t know something, this is going to be painful, but you need to first highlight what you don’t know, what elements that are the most essential, for examples, they are shown more frequently than others, they thus have higher priority.
\underbrace{y}_{\substack{\text{outcome}}}=\overbrace{f(\underbrace{x}_{\substack{\text{problem}}}|\underbrace{a}_{\substack{\text{reference}}})}^{{\text{paper's methodology}}}- Adler, Mortimer J., and Charles Van Doren. How to read a book. Simon and Schuster, 1972.[↩]
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