Re:How to read research paper, textbook, long text content?
by hwbehrens on Sunday January 09, 2022 @03:34PM
(#29867068)
As a counterexample, this [0] was a paper that I read and summarized for some colleagues a while back. It's fairly related to my area of expertise, so I didn't find it too bad -- maybe a couple of hours to grok it and do a write-up.
However, among my colleagues (all very talented in their own unrelated areas) it generated a fair amount of consternation, because although they had a week to read it, none of them felt like they had a good grasp of it until after I had presented it. The key takeaways that had jumped out at me immediately were lost in the noise.
Whether or not a week is the right time, I can definitely empathize with taking more than a day to evaluate a paper, particularly in an area not very near to your own as there might be a lot of missing background to fill in. In contrast, my PhD advisor could flip through a paper in 30 seconds and pick up the key points it took me an hour to extract. In that sense, I really think that reading papers is a skill that can be trained.
However, among my colleagues (all very talented in their own unrelated areas) it generated a fair amount of consternation, because although they had a week to read it, none of them felt like they had a good grasp of it until after I had presented it. The key takeaways that had jumped out at me immediately were lost in the noise.
Whether or not a week is the right time, I can definitely empathize with taking more than a day to evaluate a paper, particularly in an area not very near to your own as there might be a lot of missing background to fill in. In contrast, my PhD advisor could flip through a paper in 30 seconds and pick up the key points it took me an hour to extract. In that sense, I really think that reading papers is a skill that can be trained.
[0]: https://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2020/13109/pdf/LIPI...