How to do research
I am planning to take 15-712 at CMU next semester.
Three pass method for reading research papers
S. Keshav. How to Read a Paper
Don’t start a paper and just trudge through it till the end. With each passes you accomplish specific purpose.
First pass
Get a bird-eye view.
- Read the title, abstract and introduction.
- Read section and sub-section heading.
- Read conclusions
- Glance over the reference and manually tick the ones you have read or would like to read.
After the pass, try to answer following questions.
- Which other papers is it related to?
- What are the assumptions of the paper? Do they appear valid?
- What is the contribution of the paper?
- Is the paper clearly written?
Second pass
Read the paper with greater care, but ignore details such as proofs. Jot down key points, make comments in margin as you read.
- Once you are experienced, look at figures, diagrams and other illustrations carefully, if they are poorly made, it generally means the text is rushed.
- Mark relevant unread references for further reading, helps you learn more about the background of the paper.
The second pass should take about an hour.
Goal: After this pass, you should be able to grasp the contest of the paper. You should be able to summarise the main thrust of the paper, with evidence, to someone else.
Third Pass
The key to third pass is to attempt to virtually re-implement the paper: that is, making same assumptions as the authors, re-create the work. Now compare you re-created with the actual paper, now you can easily identify the papers innovations and it’s failings and assumptions.
Give greater attention to detail in this pass. You should challange every assumption of every statement.
Also jot down ideas for future work, this might help your research direction.
At the end of this, you should be able to reconstruct the entire paper from memory, and identify it’s strong and weak points.
Doing Literature Survey
- Find few recent research paper in the area via Google Scholar or CiteSeer.
- Do a single pass for each of those, and read the related work section.
- You might find a recent survey paper for the field, if that happens you are done.
- Otherwise find the citations and repeated authors name in the bibliography.
- Use these to get the key papers from respected people,
- Go to their website and find their recent publication conference, find these top conferences.
- Now look through these top conferences recent procedings, find the high-quality related work.
- Make two pass through this paper while iterating the set of papers you want to read.