How do you read papers?
Anna Kushnir
Thursday, 30 October 2008 16:32 UTC
Via FriendFeed.
Chris Lasher writes on his blog, It’s Not Easy Being Genes, about his struggles with reading scientific papers:
“As an unpublished researcher, I tend to wonder what proportion of citations appearing in publications in life sciences journals (including bioinformatics and computational biology journals) have authors typically read thoroughly? All? A quarter?
On a related note, how does one know how much of a paper to read? More importantly, how does one know how much effort to expend comprehending a publication?"
How do you read papers? Only look at the figures? Skip the intro? Have you read (really read, comprehended, and retained) every paper you have cited in your own publications?
Updated 30 October 2008 20:13 UTC
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Replies
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I typically read the title, look at who the paper was by, where they are from, read the abstract, then introduction follwed by conclusion. Next look at the figures and read the captions and then, if I’m still with the paper, sit down with a pen and a highlighter and read through from start to finish and make notes in the margin.
At any point I might well stop, normally for negative reasons (I’m not getting anything from this/this paper is not interesting/this paper is not required reading for my course) rather than positive ones (wow, I understand this straight away!).
Have I read everything I’ve cited? Not all the way through, no, but as someone said in FriendFeed, “to the depth necessary to ensure it supports the point I’m making with it.”
In contrast to Chris Lasher I think I read more quickly than my peers and hence I read more, comparatively. However, I have had to learn that downloading and printing a paper and adding it to the “to read” pile, is not the same thing as reading it.
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I was surprised that the reply from Erica Cule reflects very similarly the way I am reading a paper by. A little bit different is that I see TOC (Table of contents) figure first, and then title and corresponding authors and without-star-authors (and how many authors wrote it), and next I see the figures, and then abstract, everytime the order is not the same, though. Oh, sometimes I see affiliation before reading abstract, most recently when I apply for post-doc, I did see the affiliation for first order.
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