Paper Reading Technique

Paper reading technique taught by Andrew Ng. One thing that you do not do, is to read a paper from first word to last word.

Step 1

• Compile list of papers and additional reading material (blog post etc)
• Skim through them all, depending on how time-wrothy the idea is, try to complete to $50-100\%$
• Paper 1 [$10\%$]
• Paper 2 [$20\%$]
• Paper 3 [$80\%$]
• ...
So you are pretty much iterating through all the papers, trying to capture the key ideas. Here we are trying to get familiar with an area. In general, $20-50$ papers is enough to make you familiar with the field and $50-100$ to become an expert.

Step 2

Here we are reading paper a paper. Multiple passes.

1. Title/Abstract/Figures
2. Introduction, Concolusion, Figures, Skim Most. Skip related work.
3. Read again but skip/skim only
4. Read the whole thing, but skip parts that don't make sense.

With a lot of these papers, it's not clear what is important and what is not important. So there is no point wasting time on every single aspect of the paper which may turn out to be irrelevant.

Step 3

Questions that you must be able to answer after you are done reading the paper.

1. What are the authors trying to accomplish?
2. What were the key elements?
3. What can you use yourself?
4. What other references do you want to follow?