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This misses the best skimming trick I learned from an advisor: After you read the abstract, read the last couple lines/paragraphs of the introduction. That's wh

This misses the best skimming trick I learned from an advisor: After you read the abstract, read the last couple lines/paragraphs of the introduction. That's where you'll find the authors best summary of the paper's contributions and novelty. For instance, the first paper that popped up with some random search terms [0]: The present paper attempts to provide a structured and comprehensive overview of state-of-the-art automated driving related hardware-software practices. [...] The aim of this paper is to fill this gap in the literature with a thorough survey. The remainder of this paper is written in eight sections. Section II is an overview [...] Details [...] are given in Section III. Section IV presents [...] etc. When you have a meter high stack of papers for your lit review, comprehending long introductions and conclusions gets too expensive. You want to filter the irrelevant stuff as quickly as possible so you can spend time focused on the couple hundred papers you might actually read and cite. [0] https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2020.2983149 https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2020.2983149

ziddoap 3y ago
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean, but I don't think your trick was missed at all? The second paragraph says: >I start by reading the abstract. Then, I skim the introduction [...] A few paragraphs down, another quote says: >I always start with title and abstract. [...] I then read the introduction [...] Another: >I nearly always read the abstract first [...] I generally skim the introduction, reading its last paragraph Is there something significantly different about what you are suggesting?
- AlotOfReading 3y ago
  What I'm saying is similar to the third quote, where you start after the abstract by reading the last 1-5 lines of the introduction. Only if you want to proceed further do you dedicate the time to read or skim the entire intro, which can span multiple pages. You save tens of seconds and a lot of thinking this way, plus it helps frame things by giving a concise statement you can reference as you ask "how does what I'm reading build towards the paper's goals?"
timr 3y ago
Maybe it depends on the literature. I almost never read the introduction, unless I am unclear on the motivation for the work from the abstract. The fundamental problem with abstracts and introductions is that they're sales content. You can't trust them. The only thing you can do is decide if you wish to read further, and see if the paper says what they claim it says. For that, an abstract is sufficient about 99% of the time. Spending lots (or...any amount) of time on the intro before you read the data tables is basically asking to have time stolen from you. For what it's worth, the proportion of papers where the body doesn't support the claims in the abstract is...high. Like way above 50%, in my experience (approaching nearly 100% for any random paper you find on HN or X.) My algorithm is: * read abstract. decide to continue. * formulate my own version of the experiment in my head -- how would I go about answering this question? * read all data tables, including supplemental materials. see if anything stands out as weird. * look at all figures, including supplemental materials. see if anything stands out as weird. * do I understand the data? if not, search for table/figure references from results, until I do (generally I end up reading most of the results, out-of-order). * is this paper consistent with the way I'd have approached the problem? If not, is that important? what are the possible methodological flaws? what would they look like in the data? * re-examine data to look for signs of flaws. * does the data support the conclusion? if not, why not? what would I do differently or as a follow-up? * finally, decide if the paper worth reading in detail.
- AlotOfReading 3y ago
  In the literature I spend the most time with (archaeology/anthropology), the abstract is often focused on the broad applicability of the research to the field, which I either don't care about or already know (often both). The last line/paragraph of the introduction contains the specific contributions/findings of the paper. If and only if that's reasonable might it be worth investing the time to read further. I only rarely touch the data tables (assuming they even exist), because I don't want to spend an hour trying to understand whatever software nightmare the probably-not-computer-literate author(s) used and miss the details hidden outside the data in the explanatory text (e.g. samples were processed by throwing away all bits we couldn't identify!) that make the time spent useless.
gcr 3y ago
In the early-2010s, computer vision papers started putting a bulleted summary of that paper’s contributions at the end of the intro. It’s an enormously helpful (and fairly recent) invention. I’ve been insisting on using that pattern in the papers I write since, not just because it helps readers understand the key ideas better, but because it also forces authors to clarify the main points to themselves.
- bbsz 3y ago
  That train's probably gone with the rise of LLMs? As in, in 2020s it would be more than often just delegated to the chatbot and called quits. At least that's my thought.

ziddoap 3y ago

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean, but I don't think your trick was missed at all? The second paragraph says: >I start by reading the abstract. Then, I skim the introduction [...] A few paragraphs down, another quote says: >I always start with title and abstract. [...] I then read the introduction [...] Another: >I nearly always read the abstract first [...] I generally skim the introduction, reading its last paragraph Is there something significantly different about what you are suggesting?

AlotOfReading 3y ago
What I'm saying is similar to the third quote, where you start after the abstract by reading the last 1-5 lines of the introduction. Only if you want to proceed further do you dedicate the time to read or skim the entire intro, which can span multiple pages. You save tens of seconds and a lot of thinking this way, plus it helps frame things by giving a concise statement you can reference as you ask "how does what I'm reading build towards the paper's goals?"

timr 3y ago

Maybe it depends on the literature. I almost never read the introduction, unless I am unclear on the motivation for the work from the abstract. The fundamental problem with abstracts and introductions is that they're sales content. You can't trust them. The only thing you can do is decide if you wish to read further, and see if the paper says what they claim it says. For that, an abstract is sufficient about 99% of the time. Spending lots (or...any amount) of time on the intro before you read the data tables is basically asking to have time stolen from you. For what it's worth, the proportion of papers where the body doesn't support the claims in the abstract is...high. Like way above 50%, in my experience (approaching nearly 100% for any random paper you find on HN or X.) My algorithm is: * read abstract. decide to continue. * formulate my own version of the experiment in my head -- how would I go about answering this question? * read all data tables, including supplemental materials. see if anything stands out as weird. * look at all figures, including supplemental materials. see if anything stands out as weird. * do I understand the data? if not, search for table/figure references from results, until I do (generally I end up reading most of the results, out-of-order). * is this paper consistent with the way I'd have approached the problem? If not, is that important? what are the possible methodological flaws? what would they look like in the data? * re-examine data to look for signs of flaws. * does the data support the conclusion? if not, why not? what would I do differently or as a follow-up? * finally, decide if the paper worth reading in detail.

AlotOfReading 3y ago
In the literature I spend the most time with (archaeology/anthropology), the abstract is often focused on the broad applicability of the research to the field, which I either don't care about or already know (often both). The last line/paragraph of the introduction contains the specific contributions/findings of the paper. If and only if that's reasonable might it be worth investing the time to read further. I only rarely touch the data tables (assuming they even exist), because I don't want to spend an hour trying to understand whatever software nightmare the probably-not-computer-literate author(s) used and miss the details hidden outside the data in the explanatory text (e.g. samples were processed by throwing away all bits we couldn't identify!) that make the time spent useless.

gcr 3y ago

In the early-2010s, computer vision papers started putting a bulleted summary of that paper’s contributions at the end of the intro. It’s an enormously helpful (and fairly recent) invention. I’ve been insisting on using that pattern in the papers I write since, not just because it helps readers understand the key ideas better, but because it also forces authors to clarify the main points to themselves.

bbsz 3y ago
That train's probably gone with the rise of LLMs? As in, in 2020s it would be more than often just delegated to the chatbot and called quits. At least that's my thought.