How to Read a Paper

Presented in ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review '07. [Paper]

Author: Srinivasan Keshav (University of Waterloo)

The three-pass approach (to read a paper)

The first pass

Give a general idea about the paper.

• Five to ten minutes

• Detailed steps

  1. Carefully read the title, abstract and introduction.

  2. Read the section and sub-section headings, but ignore everything else.

  3. Read the conclusions.

  4. Glance over the references, mentally ticking off the ones you’ve already read.

• Answer five questions at the end (5c)

  1. Category: What type of paper is this? A measurement paper? An analysis of an existing system? A description of a research prototype?

  2. Context: Which other papers is it related to? Which theoretical bases were used to analyze the problem?

  3. Correctness: Do the assumption appear to be valid?

  4. Contributions: What are the paper's main contributions?

  5. Clarity: Is the paper well written?

• Use the above information to decide whether read further.

The second pass

Grasp the paper's content, but not its details.

• Take up to an hour.

• Look carefully at the figures, diagrams and other illustrations in the paper.

• Mark relevant unread references for further reading -> learn more about the background.

The third pass

Understand the paper in depth. (Mostly a reviewer)

• Four or five hours for beginners, about an hour for an experienced reader.

• Attempt to virtually re-implement the paper (from the author's view).

• Identify its strong and weak points.

How to do a literature survey

1. Use academic search engine to find three to five recent papers in this area, do one pass on each paper, then read their related work sections

2. Find shared citations and repeated author names -> obtain key papers and researchers, the top conferences