My father (PhD in Malacology) taught me when I was a kid, that a research paper should be read in the following steps<p>1. Read title and abstract
2. Read introduction
3. Read conclusions
4. If the content of the 3 previous steps makes sense, and the paper is relevant:
- Read the body of the paper
- Archive it and write bibliographic record card (yup... that old school).<p>Worked me wonders in my PhD.
On a related note, I just realized this week that there was an entire category of software dedicated to doing something I've been painstakingly doing manually for years, organizing your collection of papers.<p>They are called reference managers, and will extract the title/year/author/abstract so you can quickly glance at that obscure "iccp2012.pdf" you downloaded last month and know if it's relevant or not to your current task. Provide full text search on your entire collection, synchronization between home and work, etc.<p>Coming from an engineering background I had no idea these existed, but it sure will save me a lot of time and frustration.
I ask my students to read this: <a href="http://ccr.sigcomm.org/online/files/p83-keshavA.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://ccr.sigcomm.org/online/files/p83-keshavA.pdf</a>
I think the overall advice here is pretty solid. I might add a couple comments:<p>--- The time budget is extremely sensitive to how much you already know about the subject. If you're generally up on the literature in an area, it is often much easier to isolate the chunks that are genuinely new to you and thereby grok the paper very quickly. In a new field, even several hours to really read a paper might not be enough, depending on how much backtracking you need to do to understand core ideas.<p>--- In physics, the conventional wisdom (which I agree with) is that the main thing to do when checking out a paper is to look at the figures. These are generally chosen to highlight the most important points of the paper and will often quickly convey what was measured/calculated, how the effect scales, etc.
Then there's how to read a research paper <i>for hackers</i>.<p>I see each article as a patch. Our minds are both running operating systems and decentralized repos. Each of us are specialized and running a different custom OS, so may require different sets of patches.<p>Science is specifically concerned with our mental models of how the world works. Different fields in science are like different levels of abstraction in programming.<p>My specialty leans more towards higher levels, so subjects like psychology, philosophy, biology, are more relevant to my mental model than lower level mathematics, chemistry, and physics.<p>When I read research articles, I'm primarily interested in extracting an abstract high-level idea, which I can apply to my repo. I start with the end of the abstract, then discussion, conclusion, results, to find the main point, then only look at details if I can use them.<p>Once I have a simple idea, I merge it by connecting it to related ideas in a functional way. Each idea then becomes like a code snippet of a function, and my process of learning is like coding, where although you may copy/paste a snippet off the web, you still need to reason with logic to connect it into your code so it actually works.<p>If I can't make something work right now in my repo, it doesn't commit, so is temporarily stashed, where I may either forget about it, or come back to it if I find the missing pieces to fit it into the working directory.
I'm afraid the one-page review assignment part at the end of the article won't give much satisfaction to the instructor who came up with it. A lazy student could simply paraphrase the paper abstract to address the first two bullets (summary, arguments, conclusions).<p>I think asking for a one-page detailed example and illustration of the paper would force a more careful read, and would be more interesting for sharing with peers.
> Read critically<p>surely that means accepting that a bulk of research papers are written exceptionally poorly with excessive wordiness and jargon, a lack of good paragraph structure and not very much real content.<p>if you have to tell people who can read how to read something, its probably written incorrectly.
The person who needs instructions for reading a research paper probably ahouldn't even bother. I've seen way too many graduate (including doctoral) students need to be spoonfed how to do things. These people never turn into original thinkers who are capable of even slightly meaningful output (contributions to their field), in my experience.