> 1. Abstract 2. Introduction 3. Conclusions I know this is what students are told, but I rarely manage to understand the topic of a paper by reading the intro

> 1. Abstract 2. Introduction 3. Conclusions I know this is what students are told, but I rarely manage to understand the topic of a paper by reading the introduction and conclusion. Too many buzzwords. I usually look for the "big picture" in the literal sense (e.g. a figure showing the architecture the authors have designed etc.) and, life pro tip, the axes of the plots ("ah, there are doing something with latency and number of threads") :)