How to Read Research Papers

Reading research papers effectively is a crucial skill in academia and research. This guide will help you develop a structured approach to extract the information you need efficiently.

The Challenge

Research papers can be challenging to read for several reasons:

  • They are written in a condensed style due to page limitations
  • They assume the audience has domain expertise
  • The author’s purpose may differ from your reading objectives
  • Time constraints often prevent reading the entire paper thoroughly
Key Principles for Effective Reading

There are two fundamental aspects to developing an effective reading strategy:

  1. Identifying what information you need to extract
  2. Understanding where to find that information in the paper’s structure

Anatomy of a Research Paper

A typical research paper follows a structured but repetitive format:

Introduction
  • States the motivation behind the work
  • Outlines the proposed solution
  • Often contains enough information for a high-level understanding
Main Body
  • Presents the authors’ detailed solution
  • Describes the evaluation methodology and results
Conclusion
  • Recaps the main points
  • Discusses primary contributions
  • Often suggests future research directions
  • Places the research in context
  • Compares with existing solutions

Essential Questions to Ask

When reading a research paper, consider these key questions:

1. Motivation and Problem Statement
  • What real-world benefits would solving this problem bring?
  • What makes this a challenging technical problem?
  • Why are existing solutions (if any) inadequate?
2. Solution Analysis
  • What solution does the paper propose?
  • How does the solution address the core problem?
  • Will the solution be better than the previous ones (if any)?
3. Evaluation and Results
  • How did the authors evaluate their solution?
  • What metrics were used?
  • How convincing are the results?
4. Critical Analysis
  • How well does the solution address the stated problem?
  • What are the strengths and limitations of the approach?
  • Are there assumptions or constraints that limit applicability?
5. Contributions
  • What contributions does the paper make to its field of study?
  • This varies from simple ideas to complex software, designs and techniques.
6. Future Directions
  • What are future directions for this research?
  • What ideas did you come up with while reading the paper?
7. Questions
  • What questions are you left with?
  • These could be questions you would raise in an open discussion, or questions on things you’re finding hard to understand.
8. Summary
  • What is your take-away message from this paper?
  • Write down a summary of the research paper.
  • This is useful for very quick review and refreshing your memory. It also forces you to try to identify the essence of the work.

It’s recommended to note down your questions, and even markup the papers yourself. Highlight key sections & add notes next to interesting ideas (or confusing sentences). Above all, remain aware of the context of the paper in relation to other papers in the class or field.

If these do not suit you, you could try writing your own abstract of the paper. If you aren’t able to do so, a good old re-read of the paper could be enough to connect all the dots.

References
  1. William G. Griswold, “How to Read an Engineering Research Paper,” UC San Diego CSE, [Online]. Available: https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~wgg/CSE210/howtoread.html