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This is a good guide, but I will tell you a trick that is faster, easier, and more effective: read 2 or 3 papers. All that effort you would put into doing the

This is a good guide, but I will tell you a trick that is faster, easier, and more effective: read 2 or 3 papers. All that effort you would put into doing these steps? Instead, read 1 or 2 other papers that the author refers to in the beginning. Science is a conversation. When you read the other papers, even if you don't understand them at first, you will get a sense of the conversation. Also, some writers are abysmal, and others are amazingly lucid. Hopefully one of the 3 papers you read will be the lucid one that will help you understand the other 2.

closed 9y ago
This is great advice. Even after becoming familiar with an area, I read some authors and get swamped by unexplained terminology. Another simple trick is to look at the journal title. Articles in journals like "Trends in... " tend to be written for a broader audience, so often have clearer introductions. In general, the less specific the journal, the better the introduction will be for newcomers. (Be aware that journals with lower word limits / shorter articles may have less rigorous introductions, for better or worse)
jacobolus 9y ago
Another trick: use google scholar or a similar citation graph. Unfortunately the citation graph sites won’t show all the outgoing references from a particular paper (I assume because they’re afraid of copyright issues?) but looking at the incoming references for a paper can be very useful. If you can find an old classic paper in some subject, then most major later papers will have cited it, so you can start from google scholar search’s list of references to the classic paper, which will be sorted by citation count. Doing keyword searches within such a list of references can often quickly surface the most important papers on a subject, especially if you go a couple hops into the “cited by” graph. Often among the most-cited papers is some kind of review paper with a clear explanation of the context, overview of the literature, and extended definitions of important terms.
ouid 9y ago
There is a huge variety in the quality of writing in scientific papers, but most of it is bad, or at least totally opaque, so I'm not sure that 3 papers will give you a sense of what is good, or even have a high probability of containing a paper that you can use as an entry point, although I think your premise is correct. Probably the best evidence that a paper is a good entry point is whether or not the author cared about the abstract. A lot of scientists treat it as a chore, picking some key points from the premise, methodology, and conclusion sections, and haphazardly pasting them together into a miniature version of the paper. An abstract is a sketch of your argument. It's supposed to be how the author thinks about the work they are doing, in terms of how it relates to the work everyone else is doing. Look for an abstract which presents an argument in plain english and isn't afraid to give a little background or motivation. It might take dozens to find one though.
- jacobolus 9y ago
  Personally I find abstracts close to useless, and just skip them entirely. I’ve never found a particularly close correlation between what an abstract said and how interesting/informative/well written the rest of the paper was. YMMV.

closed 9y ago

This is great advice. Even after becoming familiar with an area, I read some authors and get swamped by unexplained terminology. Another simple trick is to look at the journal title. Articles in journals like "Trends in... " tend to be written for a broader audience, so often have clearer introductions. In general, the less specific the journal, the better the introduction will be for newcomers. (Be aware that journals with lower word limits / shorter articles may have less rigorous introductions, for better or worse)

jacobolus 9y ago

Another trick: use google scholar or a similar citation graph. Unfortunately the citation graph sites won’t show all the outgoing references from a particular paper (I assume because they’re afraid of copyright issues?) but looking at the incoming references for a paper can be very useful. If you can find an old classic paper in some subject, then most major later papers will have cited it, so you can start from google scholar search’s list of references to the classic paper, which will be sorted by citation count. Doing keyword searches within such a list of references can often quickly surface the most important papers on a subject, especially if you go a couple hops into the “cited by” graph. Often among the most-cited papers is some kind of review paper with a clear explanation of the context, overview of the literature, and extended definitions of important terms.

ouid 9y ago

There is a huge variety in the quality of writing in scientific papers, but most of it is bad, or at least totally opaque, so I'm not sure that 3 papers will give you a sense of what is good, or even have a high probability of containing a paper that you can use as an entry point, although I think your premise is correct. Probably the best evidence that a paper is a good entry point is whether or not the author cared about the abstract. A lot of scientists treat it as a chore, picking some key points from the premise, methodology, and conclusion sections, and haphazardly pasting them together into a miniature version of the paper. An abstract is a sketch of your argument. It's supposed to be how the author thinks about the work they are doing, in terms of how it relates to the work everyone else is doing. Look for an abstract which presents an argument in plain english and isn't afraid to give a little background or motivation. It might take dozens to find one though.

jacobolus 9y ago
Personally I find abstracts close to useless, and just skip them entirely. I’ve never found a particularly close correlation between what an abstract said and how interesting/informative/well written the rest of the paper was. YMMV.