[HN Gopher] How to Read a Paper [pdf]
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How to Read a Paper [pdf]
Author : sherilm
Score : 183 points
Date : 2023-11-28 14:59 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ccr.sigcomm.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (ccr.sigcomm.org)
| hprotagonist wrote:
| I absolutely love this paper.
|
| Its counterpart is Kording and Mensh, "Ten Simple Rules for
| Structuring Papers." doi.org/10.1101/088278
|
| And the strategies outlined in both ought to be taught much more
| rigorously, and at an earlier stage in an education, than they
| currently are.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/088278v5
| nittanymount wrote:
| guess this article/approach is still useful/helpful even AI could
| help do a good summary... thanks for sharing...
| nittanymount wrote:
| someone removed 1 karma for my comment above, could you explain
| why? thanks. haha
| horsellama wrote:
| If the paper is well written, the abstract is already the
| summary you are after. If you are then interested in the
| details, gpt/AI isn't helping there.
| cratermoon wrote:
| IMNSHO, asking AI to summarize a paper is a flavor of what
| Umberto Eco terms the "alibi of photocopies", where he says,
| "There are many things that I do not know because I photocopied
| a text and then relaxed as if I had read it." Today I would
| write "There are many things that I do not know because I asked
| an LLM to summarize a text and then relaxed as if I had read
| it."
| kvrck wrote:
| That's a long list of supporting organisations/institutions for a
| somewhat trivial paper.
| daveguy wrote:
| I think the lesson from this is reading papers well can help
| your funding ability.
|
| Because it's such a general paper the author felt they should
| include all funding and support organizations, not necessarily
| those that specifically paid for this paper. Better to over-
| acknowledge than under-acknowledge.
| r-zip wrote:
| I think the time estimates depend heavily on the field. A
| mathematician recently told him that it would take him 1-2 weeks
| (with nothing else to do in that time) to digest a paper outside
| his main area.
| daveguy wrote:
| That makes sense. The proof-heavy part is the third pass and
| part the author says takes the longest (4-5 hours for a
| beginner). With math papers it's essentially all proof!
| penguin_booze wrote:
| Makes me wonder: should it, though? The author of the paper
| presumably had gone through the trouble of understanding
| everything described in the paper, built intuition and a mental
| model. Instead of putting more effort in writing the latter
| down, it appears to me that authors are inclined to throw the
| proverbial baby out with the bath water: they spend more time
| writing out the dense proof rather than an exposition.
|
| I'm not saying proof isn't important or to exclude it. But
| given that more people understand plain and intuitive
| explanation (at the expense of accuracy, maybe), their hard
| work reaches broader audience that way. Isn't that what authors
| want, instead of "dog whistling"? Do proofs alone carry
| intuition? I don't think so.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| It takes many dozens of hours, sometimes hundreds, to write a
| paper (just the writing not the technical work). People will
| spend a long time trying to improve the expositions. I have
| seen papers where co-authors have fought for weeks about the
| accuracy of a single sentence. I have seen papers where there
| were over twenty draft-revision cycles.
|
| But there are natural limits. Usually, after working for
| years on a problem, you become so close to it that describing
| to a general technical audience is very difficult. Often,
| after you publish the work, someone else will do the
| difficult work of understanding your paper, and then write a
| more readable exposition as part of a review paper or book.
| apokryptein wrote:
| Interesting paper. Consequently, a similar approach is outlined
| in "How to Read a Book" by Mortimer J. Adler, which covers
| reading approaches for a variety of formats.
| lubitelpospat wrote:
| Is there a DOI for this paper? Couldn't find it
| Jtsummers wrote:
| It's an ACM publication, when in doubt search their digital
| library:
|
| https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1273445.1273458 is their entry
| for it with the following:
| https://doi.org/10.1145/1273445.1273458
| lubitelpospat wrote:
| Thank you very much!
| ssn wrote:
| "The first version of this document was drafted by my students:
| ..."
|
| So why aren't they listed as co-authors? :-)
| disqard wrote:
| They're in the "Acknowledgements" section, which is appropriate
| for this particular scheme of things. Academia is nothing if
| not a "street cred" game, and that cred is not portioned out
| easily (or equitably).
| jll29 wrote:
| I give all my doctoral students a copy of the following great
| paper (and I've used a variant of the check list at the end for
| years - avoids errors when working on multiple papers with
| multiple international teams in parallel):
|
| How to Write a Paper http://www-mech.eng.cam.ac.uk/mmd/ashby-
| paper-V6.pdf
| cratermoon wrote:
| Umberto Eco wrote a little (229p) volume titled _How to Write a
| Thesis_ in 1977. In the introduction to the revised 1985
| edition, Eco describes the book as one that "focuses on the
| spirit, mentality, and research methods required to write a
| good thesis, rather than on its content".
|
| It's a bit longer than Ashby's paper, and some of the internet
| age may look disdainfully on his advice for index cards, paper
| notes, and photocopies, but the intent behind them and the
| general method translates easily to the digital age, and
| thankfully we have tools like Zotero to drastically reduce some
| of the busywork.
| beryilma wrote:
| The moment I saw Figures 3 and 4, I knew this paper would not
| be useful for me at all. The author of the paper is likely a
| visual thinker type of person, whereas I am certainly not. The
| boxes, colors, shading, etc. on those figures would/does easily
| overwhelm me.
|
| I find simply writing an outline, section titles and
| introductory paragraphs, and iterating over and over much more
| suitable to get started with writing a paper.
| Beijinger wrote:
| This may get downvoted, but regarding to writing a thesis:
|
| If I open a thesis and see it was done in Latex I always think
| this guy can't be an idiot.
| maleldil wrote:
| That's an interesting prior. Can you expand on it?
|
| If it's because of managing latex's complexity indicating
| some kind of ability, I can guarantee you that most people
| just copy paste and tweak stuff till it works.
| Beijinger wrote:
| How am I supposed to know? I am sure there are excellent
| works from the STEM field written in word. But someone
| using latex has to at least some understanding of IT which
| is a good thing. Latex gives just a good first impression.
|
| Based on former fellow students, I knew many would just
| stick to what they are fed and never get the idea to
| acquire knowledge on their own. And Latex could be just one
| of the things that shows curiosity and independent
| knowledge acquisition.
| ayewo wrote:
| I think the refrain: "Never judge a book by it's cover"
| applies here.
|
| Our brains tend to associate good looking with well-
| researched when this isn't always the case, hence the
| refrain quoted above.
|
| So, if someone goes through the trouble of using a
| cumbersome typesetting tool like Latex to format a paper,
| perhaps they have made an important contribution that is
| worth setting aside 15-30 mins of your time to digest the
| thesis in its entirety.
| bachmeier wrote:
| In 2023, there's a good chance it was written in markdown
| and converted to latex anyway, so there's not even
| copy/paste going on.
| s0rce wrote:
| Hah, I formatted by girlfriend's thesis in Latex, I was so
| annoyed at the whole process that I did mine in MS Word.
| angra_mainyu wrote:
| Isn't that the default? I don't think I've ever done a paper
| that wasn't in LaTeX...
|
| It makes rendering mathematical notation very easy, also
| automatically tracks indices, references, labels, etc. I can
| even embed csv data to display as a table with a few lines of
| code!
|
| It's also pretty straightforward to break down the paper into
| various folders and documents and import them all in a master
| .tex file, keeping your figures and data in their own folders
| too.
|
| Can't imagine doing all of that in a bunched up in a word
| doc...
|
| I mean, you can even do all the building in a container, so I
| often check in my work, push, and the CI builds the paper and
| makes a release depending on tag/branch.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Not in many technical fields. When I was publishing in
| physics about a third to a half of my colleagues were using
| Word - all the top journals accepted it.
|
| This was over 15 years ago.
|
| CS and math are outliers.
|
| With IEEE Word was even more common.
| svilen_dobrev wrote:
| interesting. Are there such papers - that one can check the
| proofs and references and etc - on IT/computing related stuff?
| Most papers i have stumbled upon, back in time, have been some
| mumbo-jumbo showing-off this or that approach or achievement, but
| rarely coherent or consistent (one example talks X, another talks
| Y, with no link inbetween). Hence i stopped reading any such
| papers, years ago..
| cratermoon wrote:
| I recommend visiting "the morning paper: a random walk through
| Computer Science research, by Adrian Colyer". It ran from 2014
| to February of 2021, covering a paper per week or so. You can
| read Colyer's analysis first to determine if reading the paper
| sounds worth your time. There are also various lists of key
| programming/CS papers. For example, "What Every Computer
| Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic", David
| Goldberg's 1990 paper, includes various theorem proofs
| essential to understanding how IEEE floating point is defined.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Forgot the link: https://blog.acolyer.org/archives/
| cratermoon wrote:
| The 3-pass method seems to roughly correspond the Adler's[1]
| technique for reading a book. The first pass is the systematic
| skimming of the inspectional level, the second pass corresponds
| to the analytical level, and the final pass of evaluating the
| arguments and ideas corresponds to his syntopical level.
|
| 1 Adler, Mortimer Jerome, and Charles Van Doren. 1972. How to
| Read a Book. Rev. and updated ed. New York: Simon and Schuster.
| cubefox wrote:
| I don't really agree with such advice. The only important thing
| is to read (or skim) many papers in the relevant field. Initially
| they will be hard to understand as they are full of difficult
| jargon. But after a while, you will notice the jargon that
| repeats across articles, be able to look it up, and ultimately
| understand more and more. After a while it will be fairly easy.
|
| But there is no general "paper reading ability" one could learn.
| Papers outside your field of expertise will always be hard to
| understand as long as you are not used to the relevant field, the
| jargon and style.
| linuxdude314 wrote:
| In the case of science and math words are more than just
| jargon, they have precise meaning. Often jargon contains
| ambiguity but you can infer a general meaning. With the
| language of math and science you actually need to read the
| precise definition of a term to understand its meaning.
| niam wrote:
| It's reassuring since, having not habitually read papers, I've
| always wondered how (in)efficiently I read compared to readers of
| a professional sort.
| dmillar wrote:
| I used to write research at Goldman. Our chief economist would
| often give this book as an end-of-year gift. I found it useful in
| my writing:
| https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/E/bo256745...
| trostaft wrote:
| My advisor gave me this paper at the beginning of my PhD; useful
| advice especially when google scholar dumps heaps of papers onto
| you every so often. Though I'd largely ignore the time estimates.
| That varies deeply depending on the paper and field.
| mad44 wrote:
| How I read a research paper
| https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2013/07/how-i-read-researc...
| NoToP wrote:
| But how do you read "How to Read a Paper"?
| sirpilade wrote:
| This is the updated (2016) version
|
| https://svr-sk818-web.cl.cam.ac.uk/keshav/papers/07/paper-re...
| cygnion wrote:
| Thanks for the nice references. When I read documents, I look to
| organize and link information in a way that helps me recall its
| context. Another realization is that papers are often read with
| different 'hats' - as a reader, as a reviewer, or as a writer. To
| help my own process I built a document-reading that helps me
| curate, visualize, and recall personal knowledge as I read and
| annotate research papers; the app also extracts data from
| documents such as URLs and references -
| https://www.knowledgegarden.io
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