How to Read a Paper
如果想更好的理解课堂或者学术会议内容，或者紧跟行业中的最新动态，亦或者想对新领域有所了解，花费大量时间阅读论文变成了一个必修课。而S.Keshav的《How to Read a Paper》可能是最好的入门。这篇不仅提供如何读一篇论文的方法，同时也提供了如何查找一篇论文及写作论文等后续工作的建议。
Three-pass 方法
~ First-pass: A quick scan to get a bird’s-eye view of the paper.
Four Steps
- 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
Five Cs:
Category: What type of paper is this? 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 analyze the problem?Correctness: Do the assumptions appear to be valid?Contributions: What are the paper’s main contributions?Clarity: Is the paper well written?
通过first-pass，判断一篇论文值不值得读:
“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.”
~ Second-pass: Read the paper with greater care, but ignore details such as proofs.
- Look carefully at the figures, diagrams and other illustrations in the paper.
- Remember to mark relevant unread references for further reading
通过second-pass，总结文章主体内容以及相关论据:
“Summarize the main thrust of the paper, with supporting evidence, to someone else”
~ Third-pass: Attempt to virtually re-implement the paper: that is, making the same assumptions as the authors, re-create the work.
Third-pass需要大量时间，对细节进行详尽且具有批判性的论述，同样试着通过这些论证来让读者产出论点。
如何筛选一篇论文（Literature Survey）
- Use an academic search engine (Google Scholar or CiteSeer)
- Find shared citations and repeated author names in the bibliography and download the key papers, then go to the websites of the key researchers and see where they’ve published recently.
- The website for these top conferences and look through their recent proceedings
后续工作
- If you are reading a paper to do a review, you should also read Timothy Roscoe’s paper on “Writing reviews for systems conferences”
- If you’re planning to write a technical paper, you should refer both to Henning Schulzrinne’s comprehensive website and George Whitesides’s excellent overview of the process.