Efficient Reading to Benefit from Research Articles
Today, I will write some keynotes for researchers to be able to read and evaluate an academic paper and how to reflect smoothly the innovations in the industry.
“There’s no discovery without a search and there’s no rediscovery without a research. Every discovery man ever made has always been concealed. It takes searchers and researchers to unveil them, that’s what make an insightful leader” Benjamin Suulola
First of all, reading a research paper about a topic for which you have not read a coursebook before means expecting benefit by watching only the end of a movie that you haven’t watched in the beginning. Besides not being selective and trying to read every single paper in detail leads to be exposed to unnecessary and/or noisy information.
First and foremost, the requirement for a publication worth reading is to make sure that it is highly indexed or written by qualified people. For example in my field of research, such indexes are SCI (science citation index) or SCI-E (science citation index-expanded) are evaluated as worth reading. You don’t have to get stuck about the word “expanded ‘’ as it is not a definition designed to include low-quality ones. In the last 5 years, researchers in particular in the industry think that the earnings of publishing houses are unfair and have released their works as “preprint” through arXiv and bioXriv. This situation requires you to have the ability to search and find high-academic content in these environments. For instance, you can better follow the latest trends in machine learning, which is my research area, from arXiv.
When you encounter a paper, it is not possible to read it completely. At this point, a very efficient and useful technique named “three-pass reading” comes into play. So, what is three-pass reading? Let me clarify the theory and how I implement it.
As the name suggests, it consists of three stages. In the following paragraphs, they are given one by one.
The first stage is a quick scan of the paper likely a bird’s eye view. First, read the title, try to understand whether there is a brand new invention claim or whether a new problem is solved with the existing ones. Then read the abstract section and inquire whether it relates to the title. Then read the conclusion section and try to understand how much it fits with the abstract section. If you notice a discrepancy between these or the use of broken language syntax, you can stop reading for this paper at this point. If not, only read the titles of the sub-sections as well as a glance at the references whether to know any paper you have already read (maybe your paper) has been cited, now you are ready for the second stage. At the end of this stage, you need to decide on whether to switch to the following stage. My advice is that you should be able to eliminate 90% of the papers you come across at this stage.
The second stage should last at least 30 minutes. You should check whether the flow diagram of the prosed system and the content of the publication are aligned, the pixel quality of the figure together with its axes titles, whether the equations are in accordance with the given notation, and whether the digits in the tables are an averaged value of something with kindly provided standard errors. At this stage, there is no need to read the work with all its details. However, you must have been familiar with the academic presentation of the research as well as the results. At the end of this stage, you should decide that whether this paper is beneficial for you or not. If not, from that moment on you should stop reading the paper. My advice is that you should be able to eliminate 7% of the papers you come across at this stage.
The papers you focus on at each stage should decrease like a decrease in the rise of the pyramid. You need to evaluate the results obtained by coding the proposed methods in your mind. You should also build bridges with the paper by first running then reviewing the source codes shared by the authors. Finally, at this stage, you should determine the reference work that the authors are mostly inspired by and continue your research process through this reference study.
In this article, I tried to convey several accepted effective article reading techniques by combining them with my own experience. I hope it will be useful.
