How to Read a Paper

As We all know, beginning graduate students must learn on their own using trial and error to study how to read a paper, but it wastes much effort in the process. So, it’s very essential to know how to read papers efficiently for graduate students. Now I will introduce you to some methods when I read a paper.

The following are some reference materials I have learned, I just sort out the methods I think are suitable for me to read the paper.

HowtoReadPaper.pdf

https://bitesizebio.com/11060/how-to-read-a-scientific-paper/

The following are my personal views, and comments are welcome.

Firstly, I think it’s hard to start at the beginning and plow our way to the end when we read a paper. So, it’s helpful to read the paper in stages for us. I learned that the three-passes reading method is very good and I would like to recommend it to you. The first pass is a quick scan of the paper.

This pass consists of the following steps:

• Carefully read the title, abstract, and introduction.
• Read the section and sub-section headings but ignore everything else.
• Read the conclusions.

The first pass takes about 10 minutes to 15 minutes. At the end of the first pass, you are asked to answer the following questions:

• Does the assumption mentioned in this paper appear to be valid?
• What are the paper’s main contributions?
• Is the paper written well?

Using the method, you could choose not to read the paper further. Because the paper could not interest you or the authors make invalid assumptions.

In the second pass, you should read the paper with greater care but ignore details such as proofs. For the second pass, you should take up to an hour. After this pass, you should know the main content of the paper, and you are supposed to summarize the main thrust. In the second pass, you could skip the specific steps and details of the experiment, but you should carefully look at the figures, diagrams, and other illustrations in the paper.

To fully understand a paper, it’s necessary to read the third pass for us. The key to the third pass is to attempt to virtually re-implement the paper: that is, making the same assumptions as the authors re-create the work. By comparing the re-creation with the actual paper, you can easily identify not only the paper’s innovations but also its hidden fallings and assumptions. The pass requires great attention to detail, and it could take about four to five hours for beginners. At the end of this pass, you should be able to reconstruct the entire structure of the paper from memory, as well as be able to identify its strong and weak points.