Comment by vivzkestrel
1 day ago
- big questions to you guys
- how do you actually go about reading one of these IEEE or arxiv papers?
- do you read only the abstract for most?
- do you read everything in 1 scan and what do you about references? do you follow through all the references?
- do you ask a GPT to help explain? what does your prompt look like?
The first thing to note is that papers vary wildly in terms of their information density and in terms of their accessibility and relevance to you as a reader. I can easily imagine reading some papers many times because I really want to understand all the details.
That said, the depth that I read at mostly depends on why I am reading something. Most papers I don't read in depth, but whether I initially only read the abstract or skim the whole paper depends a lot on a lot of factors (paper content, length, ease of access to full text, whether I am triaging a lot of papers at once, how interested I am in the specific paper (usually based on the title and/or authors, maybe the abstract), etc.).
I read in multiple passes of increasing depth. Zeroth reading is more-or-less triage: is the paper worth reading at all? First reading would generally be start-to-finish. I underline and/or mark up the margins with particularly interesting/important sections and also star key references based on the author's commentary.
If it's an algorithm or math-heavy paper either I only care about the gist and I don't go deeper, or I dig in with further readings and study to properly understand the details. That could be relatively quick, or it could be a whole rabbit hole if I need to learn some background. Sometimes it takes a while for the importance of a paper to dawn on me, in which case I come back later and read in more depth.
With the references I generally only follow those with relevance to my research goals. For example the authors might have detailed a technique in an earlier paper, or they might have cited other relevant work that I was not aware of.
Oh this is a super-important question, and I wish I'd gotten the following advice much earlier than I did:
1. First read the abstract and conclusion
2. Then flip through the figures and their captions, and try to understand them as best as you can (though this doesn't work for all papers)
3. Make a deliberate decision about whether it's worth it to dive into the details and read the full text.
LLMs are incredibly useful for parsing dense literature, but I think it's better to ask specific questions about the paper, jargon, equations etc. rather than to have it summarize the paper for you. Summaries are often shallow or even misleading, and they rob you of the opportunity to engage actively with the paper.
https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs114/reading-keshav.pdf is a way to do it. I just usually read it in one pass and then go back later and figure out the things I didn't understand.