178-How to read paper

The first pass

it gives a general idea about a paper => get a bird’s-eye view should take about 5-10 mins

• Carefully read the title, abstract, and introduction
• The section and sub-section headings
• read the conclusions
• (glance over) the references

after the first pass

need to ask 5 Cs

• Category: what type of paper?
• Context: Which theoretical bases were used to analyze?
• Correctness: valid or not?
• Contributions
• Clarity: well written?

The second pass

grasp the paper’s content, but not its details should take 1 h

• graphs: axes properly labels? / results with error bars? / results are statistically significant?
• mark relevant unread references

The third pass

helps understand the paper in depth beginners: 4-5 h

should be able to reconstruct the entire structure of the paper from memory