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3 months ago

How to Read a Paper
S. Keshav
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo
Waterloo, ON, Canada
keshav@uwaterloo.ca
ABSTRACT
Researchers spend a great deal of time reading research pa-
pers. 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 de-
scribe how to use this method to do a literature survey.
Categories and Subject Descriptors: A.1 [Introductory
and Survey]
General Terms: Documentation.
Keywords: Paper, Reading, Hints.
1. INTRODUCTION
Researchers must read papers for several reasons: to re-
view them for a conference or a class, to keep current in
their field, or for a literature survey of a new field. A typi-
cal researcher will likely spend hundreds of hours every year
reading papers.
Learning to efficiently read a paper is a critical but rarely
taught skill. Beginning graduate students, therefore, must
learn on their own using trial and error. Students waste
much effort in the process and are frequently driven to frus-
tration.
For many years I have used a simple approach to efficiently
read papers. This paper describes the ‘three-pass’ approach
and its use in doing a literature survey.
2. THE THREE-PASS APPROACH
The key idea is that you should read the paper in up to
three passes, instead of starting at the beginning and plow-
ing your way to the end. Each pass accomplishes specific
goals and builds upon the previous pass: The f irst pass
gives you a general idea about the paper. The second pass
lets you grasp the paper’s content, but not its details. The
third pass helps you understand the paper in depth.
2.1 The first pass
The first pass is a quick scan to get a bird’s-eye view of
the paper. You can also decide whether you need to do any
more passes. This pass should take about five to ten minutes
and consists of the following steps:
1. Carefully read the title, abstract, and introduction
2. Read the section and sub-section headings, but ignore
everything else
3. Read the conclusions
4. Glance over the references, mentally ticking off the
ones you’ve already read
At the end of the first pass, you should be able to answer
the five Cs:
1. Category: What type of paper is this? A measure-
ment paper? An analysis of an existing system? A
description of a research prototype?
2. Context: Which other papers is it related to? Which
theoretical bases were used to analyze the problem?
3. Correctness: Do the assumptions appear to be valid?
4. Contributions: What are the paper’s main contribu-
tions?
5. Clarity: Is the paper well written?
Using this information, you may choose not to read fur-
ther. This could be because the paper doesn’t interest you,
or you don’t know enough about the area to understand the
paper, or that the authors make invalid assumptions. The
first pass is adequate for papers that aren’t in your research
area, but may someday prove relevant.
Incidentally, when you write a paper, you can expect most
reviewers (and readers) to make only one pass over it. Take
care to choose coherent section and sub-section titles and
to write concise and comprehensive abstracts. If a reviewer
cannot understand the gist after one pass, the paper will
likely be rejected; if a reader cannot understand the high-
lights of the paper after five minutes, the paper will likely
never be read.
2.2 The second pass
In the second pass, read the paper with greater care, but
ignore details such as proofs. It helps to jot down the key
points, or to make comments in the margins, as you read.
1. Look carefully at the figures, diagrams and other illus-
trations in the paper. Pay special attention to graphs.
Are the axes properly labeled? Are results shown with
error bars, so that conclusions are statistically sig-
nificant? Common mistakes like these will separate
rushed, shoddy work from the truly excellent.
2. Remember to mark relevant unread references for fur-
ther reading (this is a good way to learn more about
the background of the paper).

The second pass should take up to an hour. After this
pass, you should be able to grasp the content of the paper.
You should be able to summarize the main thrust of the pa-
per, with supporting evidence, to someone else. This level of
detail is appropriate for a paper in which you are interested,
but does not lie in your research speciality.
Sometimes you won’t understand a paper even at the end
of the second pass. This may be because the subject matter
is new to you, with unfamiliar terminology and acronyms.
Or the authors may use a proof or experimental technique
that you don’t understand, so that the bulk of the pa-
per is incomprehensible. The paper may be poorly written
with unsubstantiated assertions and numerous forward ref-
erences. Or it could just be that it’s late at night and you’re
tired. You can now choose to: (a) set the paper aside, hoping
you don’t need to understand the material to be successful
in your career, (b) return to the paper later, perhaps after
reading background material or (c) persevere and go on to
the third pass.
2.3 The third pass
To fully understand a paper, particularly if you are re-
viewer, requires a third pass. 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 this re-creation with the actual paper,
you can easily identify not only a paper’s innovations, but
also its hidden failings and assumptions.
This pass requires great attention to detail. You should
identify and challenge every assumption in every statement.
Moreover, you should think about how you yourself would
present a particular idea. This comparison of the actual
with the virtual lends a sharp insight into the proof and
presentation techniques in the paper and you can very likely
add this to your repertoire of tools. During this pass, you
should also jot down ideas for future work.
This pass can take about four or five hours for beginners,
and about an hour for an experienced reader. 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. In particular, you should
be able to pinpoint implicit assumptions, missing citations
to relevant work, and potential issues with experimental or
analytical techniques.
3. DOING A LITERATURE SURVEY
Paper reading skills are put to the test in doing a literature
survey. This will require you to read tens of papers, perhaps
in an unfamiliar field. What papers should you read? Here
is how you can use the three-pass approach to help.
First, use an academic search engine such as Google Scholar
or CiteSeer and some well-chosen keywords to find three to
five recent papers in the area. Do one pass on each pa-
per to get a sense of the work, then read their related work
sections. You will find a thumbnail summary of the recent
work, and perhaps, if you are lucky, a pointer to a recent
survey paper. If you can find such a survey, you are done.
Read the survey, congratulating yourself on your good luck.
Otherwise, in the second step, find shared citations and
repeated author names in the bibliography. These are the
key papers and researchers in that area. Download the key
papers and set them aside. Then go to the websites of the
key researchers and see where they’ve published recently.
That will help you identify the top conferences in that field
because the best researchers usually publish in the top con-
ferences.
The third step is to go to the website for these top con-
ferences and look through their recent proceedings. A quick
scan will usually identify recent high-quality related work.
These papers, along with the ones you set aside earlier, con-
stitute the first version of your survey. Make two passes
through these papers. If they all cite a key paper that you
did not find earlier, obtain and read it, iterating as neces-
sary.
4. EXPERIENCE
(text continued on next image description)

(continued from previous image)
I’ve used this approach for the last 15 years to read con-
ference proceedings, write reviews, do background research,
and to quickly review papers before a discussion. This dis-
ciplined approach prevents me from drowning in the details
before getting a bird’s-eye-view. It allows me to estimate the
amount of time required to review a set of papers. More-
over, I can adjust the depth of paper evaluation depending
on my needs and how much time I have.
5. RELATED WORK
If you are reading a paper to do a review, you should also
read Timothy Roscoe’s paper on “Writing reviews for sys-
tems conferences” [2]. If you’re planning to write a technical
paper, you should refer both to Henning Schulzrinne’s com-
prehensive web site [3] and George Whitesides’s excellent
overview of the process [4]. Finally, Simon Peyton Jones
has a website that covers the entire spectrum of research
skills [1].
6. A REQUEST
I would like to make this a living document, updating it
as I receive comments. Please take a moment to email me
any comments or suggestions for improvement. You can also
add comments at CCRo, the online edition of CCR [5].
7. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The first version of this document was drafted by my stu-
dents: Hossein Falaki, Earl Oliver, and Sumair Ur Rahman.
My thanks to them. I also benefited from Christophe Diot’s
perceptive comments and Nicole Keshav’s eagle-eyed copy-
editing.
This work was supported by grants from the National
Science and Engineering Council of Canada, the Canada
Research Chair Program, Nortel Networks, Microsoft, Intel
Corporation, and Sprint Corporation.
8. REFERENCES
[1] S. Peyton Jones, “Research Skills,”
http://research.microsoft.com/ simonpj/Papers/giving-
a-talk/giving-a-talk.htm.
[2] T. Roscoe, “Writing Reviews for Systems
Conferences,”
http://people.inf.ethz.ch/troscoe/pubs/review-
writing.pdf.
[3] H. Schulzrinne, “Writing Technical Articles,”
http://www.cs.columbia.edu/ hgs/etc/writing-
style.html.
(text from current image)
[4] G.M. Whitesides, “Whitesides’ Group: Writing a
Paper,”
http://www.che.iitm.ac.in/misc/dd/writepaper.pdf.
[5] ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review
Online, http://www.sigcomm.org/ccr/drupal/.

how to read a paper.pdf

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3 months ago

It's so funny to me that people think of Math/Mathematicians as being hyper-logical and rational. Like, have you seen some of the wild things hiding in the Math?

Did you know there are non-computable numbers?? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaitin%27s_constant)

Did you know that there are things that are true, but we can't prove them??? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_theorems)

Did you know that we can prove that something exists, and yet never actually figure out what that thing is?? (https://mathworld.wolfram.com/NonconstructiveProof.html)

Math is crazy. Math is wild. Math hardly makes sense, and when you think you understand the weirdest parts of it, everyone who hears you explain it to thinks you're a gibbering lunatic.

"In mathematics you don’t understand things. You just get used to them." - von Neumann

(please share more unhinged math with me, i want to see more scary math)

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3 months ago

日本のオノマトぺ

In Japanese, there are 3 types of onomatopoeia.

日本語のオノマトペには、擬声語=動物や人間の声を表す言葉、擬音語=物の音を表す言葉、擬態語=動作や様子を表す言葉。

擬声語- 犬がワンワンとほえる。- dogs go ‘wanwan’ (woof woof in English)

擬音語- 水をごくごくと飲んでいる。- I ‘glug’ water

擬態語- ドアがバタンと閉まった。- the door ‘slams’ shut

My favourite one so far is しくしく which is like ‘sobs’ but it reminds me of sniffling 😢.

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3 months ago

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3 months ago

いろどり · irodori - Japanese for life in Japan

(⁠｡⁠•̀⁠ᴗ⁠-⁠)⁠✧ resources

IRODORI is a useful website made by The Japan Foundation. It is a series of 3 textbooks, with audios and materials completely free, focusing on developing skills useful for life in Japan.

Whether you are planning to come to Japan in the future and want to learn what you should be able to do before you arrive, or whether you are already living in Japan and wish to check your Japanese ability and increase the number of things you can do, we sincerely hope that this textbook will help you achieve your goals. - "what is irodori" website page.

The textbooks are super organized, divided in: starter (A1), elementary 1 and elementary 2. Finishing elementary 2 means having an A2 level [At A2 level, you can hold short, basic everyday conversations on familiar topics.]

I recommend styling your learning method with the goal you have in mind. You can understand more about it reading the post I made.

Hope it was helpful! Let me know and let's share resources~

またね～@inkichan

꒰ა ˚₊ ✧・┈・╴﹕꒰ ᐢ｡- ༝ -｡ᐢ ꒱﹕╴・┈・𐑺 ‧₊˚໒꒱

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1 month ago

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3 months ago

Coding resource!

exercism.org

A free website where you get specific problems to methodically learn small concepts of a programming language. Do 10 minutes to 1 hour every day, and then you will keep practicing every day, and you will be able to use the skills you learn in your real projects. They walk you through the problem all the way, and it's a super good way to learn!

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tech coding resources web development

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1 month ago

tip for improving japanese reading speed!

how about you try some カラオケ???

i've been doing this for a couple years now and i think this has single-handedly made my reading speed in japanese improve to the point of almost being as fast as it is in english (although i still struggle with kanji and katakana sometimes x_x)

to find one, i usually just search on youtube (song name) followed by either カラオケ or ニコカラ. if nobody has made a karaoke for your song of choice, then i'd otherwise search up (song name) followed by 歌詞 (kashi/lyrics) and you'll usually find them that way. i like to use the site utaten.com because they all feature furigana! be a little careful though because while its only happened to me a couple of times, there's been times where the furigana is wrong for one or two words.

i think this is a really fun way to practice especially if you love singing, like i do!! i've never seen anyone else recommend this so i hope this helps

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1 month ago

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3 months ago

YouTube Channels for Kids by JLPT Levels

(⁠｡⁠•̀⁠ᴗ⁠-⁠)⁠✧ resources

こんにちは, Japanese learners! Learning a language is an exciting adventure, isn't it? To add a spark of joy to your Japanese learning journey, here's a collection of YouTube channels tailored for kids. Organized by JLPT levels, these channels offer a blend of education and entertainment for learners at different stages. Keep in mind, though, that JLPT levels aren't an exact science like math – language learning can be subjective in terms of difficulty. However, these resources provide a fantastic starting point and a fun way to explore the world of Japanese language and culture. Let's hop into this delightful world of animated learning and playful discoveries!

Friendly reminder to adjust your way of learning in order to make the most of what you're studying to reach the goal you truly want! read my post about it (ᵔ◡ᵔ)