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I'm slowly finishing up my PhD and I tend to agree with you. However, he will probably be reading quite a different selection of papers than what you encounter
by avian 10y ago
I'm slowly finishing up my PhD and I tend to agree with you. However, he will probably be reading quite a different selection of papers than what you encounter during a PhD.
In my experience, time required varies quite a lot between papers and authors. If you take a paper from, say, top 1% (or 0.1%) of papers published on some broad topic, you can probably read through it once and get some relatively good understanding of what the author was trying to say (and very likely enough to write a short re-cap).
This is definitely not true for the remaining 99% of the published scientific literature. At one point I had the idea of keeping up with my field of research by setting up Google Scholar alerts. This resulted in about 1 paper per 2-3 days that seemed to be worth studying based on the title and abstract. Still at that rate I found it quite impossible to keep up with all the content that dredged up.
- munin 10y agoI took classes in my PhD where we would read 4 papers a week, which is close to one a weekday. Some of the papers were very theory-heavy, when those came up you would spend half a day just reading. Of course, for a seminar class, you do the strategic thing and read enough to not be caught flat-footed during seminar, and to come up with a few salient points of discussion. I looked some at the papers read for this project and they seemed to be very systems-heavy. Having taken both theory-heavy and systems-heavy seminar classes, the systems-heavy seminar reading loads were much easier. You could probably read 5-8 systems papers a week, to comprehension, if you really wanted to.