3-pass Approach
- a general idea about the paper
- grasp the paper’s content, but not its details
- helps you understand the paper in depth
1 (~5 min)
Quick scan to get a bird’s-eye view of the paper
- Carefully read the title, abstract, and introduction
- Read the section and sub-section headings, but ignore everything else.
- Read the conclusions.
- Glance over the references, mentally ticking off the ones you’ve already read
Answer 5 Cs:
- Category: What type of the paper is? A measurement paper? An analysis of an existing system? A description of a research prototype?
- Context: Which other papers is it related to? Which theoretical bases were used to analyse the problem?
- Correctness: Do the assumptions appear to be valid?
- Contributions: What are the paper’s main contributions?
- Clarity: Is the paper well written?
2 (~ 1 hour)
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.
Look carefully at the figures, diagrams and other illustrations in the paper. Pay special attention to graphs. Are the axes properly labelled? Are results shown with error bars, so that conclusions are statistically significant? Common mistakes like these will separate rushed, shoddy work from the truly excellent.
Remember to mark relevant unread references for further reading (this is a good way to learn more about the background of the paper).
be able to summarize the main thrust of the paper, 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 specialty
3
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.