How to Read Academic Papers and Chapters
Paulo Raposo
2019-05-20
Whether you're a student, faculty, or some other stripe of researcher, you'll read boatloads of papers over the years — or at least you ought to! The following is a short essay on why and how you should read academic papers in a systematic and non-linear way, as well as some suggestions on how to formally archive your knowledge of the papers you've read. Some quick highlights:
- Many papers you'll read should only get a few minutes of your attention.
- Certain other papers should get a lot more attention than that.
- Keeping notes, and systematically archiving those notes, will help you quickly and accurately recall information from papers read long ago — this is great for times when you're under tight deadlines, like while writing your own papers.
- Being a good scientific author means writing clearly and systematically, so that your papers are more likely to be clearly decoded by your readers.
howtoreadpapersandchapters.pdf