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> 1. Are capable of understanding everything in the paper Agreed. In my academic field (Debuggers), to understand and know enough to give a real review of the
by pnathan 15y ago
> 1. Are capable of understanding everything in the paper
Agreed. In my academic field (Debuggers), to understand and know enough to give a real review of the subject requires reading what I would estimate to be somewhere around a thousand papers. It also requires keeping up with the major industrial producers of the product. I think the field has something like two to three thousand papers right now, I haven't checked in a while.
For my work, I am just hitting the seminal papers and trying to avoid spending time reading work that led nowhere. I've read maybe two-three hundred articles (haven't tracked), and my thesis cites over one hundred.
So no, ordinary people won't do that. Ordinary computer programmers won't do that. Most people are not capable (or prepared) to understand everything in a given paper and comment on what has gone before and what has been tried before.
Academic knowledge maintenance is the total philosophical opposite of tl;dr and Twitter.
- angersock 15y agoOut of curiosity, is there some place to locate a clear listing of the seminal works in your field? I'm genuinely curious how much of the difficulty here is actual breadth/depth of the subject matter, and how much of the difficulty is due to some systemic inefficiency in the way research is published and consumed.
- pnathan 15y agoNot that I've seen, but that does not mean I simply haven't stumbled into the right FAQ.
- PotatoEngineer 15y agoThe trick is usually to look at the references section of a paper. If there's an old paper in there (say, >10 years old), then it's probably seminal. If you see the same paper in a lot of reference sections, then it's probably seminal. So: to know what's seminal so you can skip reading a bunch of papers, you need to read a bunch of papers. Right.
- khafra 15y agoSounds like a machine learning problem.