The comment mentioned (reply to the pinned comment as of writing): > If I'm trying to understand it deeply enough to mechanistically understand how the methodo

The comment mentioned (reply to the pinned comment as of writing): > If I'm trying to understand it deeply enough to mechanistically understand how the methodology work, this can take a few days to a week. > If I'm trying to reproduce the paper result to incorporate it within my own research project, I might wrestle with the thing for a full month. > However, I don't do this process with all papers. That would be wasteful. I select which paper have high relevancy for myself and my lab by reading lots of them superficially, then I pin point a few that have disproportionate benefits. while the "deeply understand" notion might mean something else outside of the scope of the OP (assuming they are not doing this for further research), it seems that practically you spend a few days (not completely) to understand enough. personally i struggle to find good quality of technical writing in this field than not, and maybe that says about my competence more than anything else. given the empirical nature of tweaking some abstraction layer to have the paper in most cases, there must be a better way to present results.