3 ms·

This got me wondering: What am I missing by not being in the habit of reading research papers? I remember being in college and finding nearly every paper I wan

by bluehex 12y ago

This got me wondering: What am I missing by not being in the habit of reading research papers? I remember being in college and finding nearly every paper I wanted to reference was behind a paywall, to the point that I lost all interest in even trying to gain access. I'm sure my own laziness plays a role, but I feel like the restricted access trained me to think research papers are for academics and scientists and it's not worth the effort to try reading them. Now I'm a professional Software Engineer and I can count the number of research papers I've read on my hands. I wonder how much better off the next generation of knowledge workers will be as access becomes more open.

sjtrny 12y ago
You're probably not missing much in terms of publications related to your field of work. This mostly applies to active researches.
dredmorbius 12y ago
I find that the practice of reading any given stream of data without some directed filtering on my own part is relatively low. But once you do find a specific topic of interest, the ability to go directly to high-grade, quality sources on that topic is hugely useful. I've been pursuing just such a research project over the past several years, and tools such as /r/scholar and Library Genesis (as well as traditional bookstores and libraries) are phenomenally useful. The problem I increasingly run into in the online world is that first-order sources -- social media, blogs, and for the most part even news media, are of exceeding poor quality. They fail to cite sources, they're often simply memetic rip-offs, or copy highlights from corporate press releases. I highlighted an instance just today concerning a biomethane bus story out of the UK -- as with many renewable energy stories, it was lacking in specific quantification and contextual information, which I've supplied: https://plus.google.com/u/0/104092656004159577193/posts/ZmMgamRV1YW https://plus.google.com/u/0/104092656004159577193/posts/ZmMg... Worth noting as well: the source of the additional information was 1) Wikipedia (for population measures), my own familiarity with human dietary baselines, the International Energy Agency, and a UK government office which posts its data reports online. The ability to dig into specific academic articles is huge though. I'm also finding a renewed love of books -- there's something about going through a work that someone spent a few years assembling and citing (books lacking indices, bibliographies, and footnotes or end-notes are not worth having). What's killer now is to be able to read a book, see a point of interest, follow the citation, and then call up the specific paper or report there and then to see what exactly it says. This both hugely increases the information available to the researcher, and reduces the friction of verifying citations. Often you'll find that there are foundational works, otherwise not generally available, which are very useful. Those published prior to ~1920 are very frequently freely available. Project Gutenberg and The Internet Archive have wide-ranging collections, but there are other organizations which have their own assemblages of works (including, ironically given my own views on the subjects, many free-market fundamentalist and libertarian organizations). Among my bigger frustrations is actually managing all of this -- tools to bookmark, reference, cite, annotate, call-up, etc., electronic media are greatly wanting.
- Havvy 12y ago
  It's not ironic. Sharing freely is part of the free market. Price points of zero are not disbarred.
vidarh 12y ago
It depends greatly on the field. When I did my MSc dissertation on methods to improve OCR error correction, and had to pick a set of OCR engines to test, it was illuminating to see just how badly e.g. gocr and ocrad fared vs. Tesseract (which started out closed source) and commercial products (this was years ago so the situation may have changed). In that field it was clear that even relatively basic methods from the literature had not yet made it into open source "organically" and it was first the open sourcing of Tesseract that appeared to start to make some of the algorithms more widespread. There are many niches like that, but you can also easily spend the entirety of your software engineering career never touching on areas where the research papers will be particularly critical to you. It also depends on whether there are many "bridges". E.g. in areas like distributed computing that are hot fields in the tech industry, a lot of the research gets jumped on pretty quickly by people that implement the algorithms presented and/or nicely digests it into blog posts for us, and for most people it's then sufficient to "just" track that, unless you want to be at the true cutting edge of the field. I like reading research papers, but frankly it is mostly for my own curiosity rather than because it's a necessity.
DanBC 12y ago
General media is usually terrible at reporting science. Being able to read the papers is useful to cut through the bullshit.
arca_vorago 12y ago
I think you owe it to yourself to find out. I took a similar approach to you for quite some time, spending lots of time at the library researching subjects instead (if you are looking for high quality sources, a good library is worth it's weight in gold.) When I became the sysadmin for a next-gen genetics company though, I found myself daily reading journal articles, at first for learning the subject matter I was dealing with, and later I found it useful even for normal sysadmin work. For example, I recently was debating a private MPLS network vs flat internet using IPSec for interoffice communication. Searching google for MPLS vs IPSec brought up a handful of opinion pieces that were light on data and facts. After a few searches in one of the scholarly databases though, I found a paper with actual testing and benchmarks, which helped me make my decision. (MPLS won, if you are curious) I find that if you are looking for an erudite and lucid thinker, you need to find the right book. If you are looking for data and statistics and scientific method, papers can't be beat. Be wary though, I feel as if the scrutiny process has gone downhill, and a lot of questionable science makes it though, so be skeptical. I also find the history of scientific papers very interesting, particularly The Royal Society and how, originally, it was purposefully used to control the flow of information to the proletariat. I think this pattern has never fully been broken, and it is why we are seeing/will see an increasingly overt attempt to balkanize and paywall the internet. It must be brought under "control", because it's anarchistic freedom of thought model is a threat to TPTB. This was also a passion of A Swartz.

by bluehex 12y ago

sjtrny 12y ago

You're probably not missing much in terms of publications related to your field of work. This mostly applies to active researches.

dredmorbius 12y ago

I find that the practice of reading any given stream of data without some directed filtering on my own part is relatively low. But once you do find a specific topic of interest, the ability to go directly to high-grade, quality sources on that topic is hugely useful. I've been pursuing just such a research project over the past several years, and tools such as /r/scholar and Library Genesis (as well as traditional bookstores and libraries) are phenomenally useful. The problem I increasingly run into in the online world is that first-order sources -- social media, blogs, and for the most part even news media, are of exceeding poor quality. They fail to cite sources, they're often simply memetic rip-offs, or copy highlights from corporate press releases. I highlighted an instance just today concerning a biomethane bus story out of the UK -- as with many renewable energy stories, it was lacking in specific quantification and contextual information, which I've supplied: https://plus.google.com/u/0/104092656004159577193/posts/ZmMgamRV1YW https://plus.google.com/u/0/104092656004159577193/posts/ZmMg... Worth noting as well: the source of the additional information was 1) Wikipedia (for population measures), my own familiarity with human dietary baselines, the International Energy Agency, and a UK government office which posts its data reports online. The ability to dig into specific academic articles is huge though. I'm also finding a renewed love of books -- there's something about going through a work that someone spent a few years assembling and citing (books lacking indices, bibliographies, and footnotes or end-notes are not worth having). What's killer now is to be able to read a book, see a point of interest, follow the citation, and then call up the specific paper or report there and then to see what exactly it says. This both hugely increases the information available to the researcher, and reduces the friction of verifying citations. Often you'll find that there are foundational works, otherwise not generally available, which are very useful. Those published prior to ~1920 are very frequently freely available. Project Gutenberg and The Internet Archive have wide-ranging collections, but there are other organizations which have their own assemblages of works (including, ironically given my own views on the subjects, many free-market fundamentalist and libertarian organizations). Among my bigger frustrations is actually managing all of this -- tools to bookmark, reference, cite, annotate, call-up, etc., electronic media are greatly wanting.

Havvy 12y ago
It's not ironic. Sharing freely is part of the free market. Price points of zero are not disbarred.

vidarh 12y ago

It depends greatly on the field. When I did my MSc dissertation on methods to improve OCR error correction, and had to pick a set of OCR engines to test, it was illuminating to see just how badly e.g. gocr and ocrad fared vs. Tesseract (which started out closed source) and commercial products (this was years ago so the situation may have changed). In that field it was clear that even relatively basic methods from the literature had not yet made it into open source "organically" and it was first the open sourcing of Tesseract that appeared to start to make some of the algorithms more widespread. There are many niches like that, but you can also easily spend the entirety of your software engineering career never touching on areas where the research papers will be particularly critical to you. It also depends on whether there are many "bridges". E.g. in areas like distributed computing that are hot fields in the tech industry, a lot of the research gets jumped on pretty quickly by people that implement the algorithms presented and/or nicely digests it into blog posts for us, and for most people it's then sufficient to "just" track that, unless you want to be at the true cutting edge of the field. I like reading research papers, but frankly it is mostly for my own curiosity rather than because it's a necessity.

DanBC 12y ago

General media is usually terrible at reporting science. Being able to read the papers is useful to cut through the bullshit.

arca_vorago 12y ago

I think you owe it to yourself to find out. I took a similar approach to you for quite some time, spending lots of time at the library researching subjects instead (if you are looking for high quality sources, a good library is worth it's weight in gold.) When I became the sysadmin for a next-gen genetics company though, I found myself daily reading journal articles, at first for learning the subject matter I was dealing with, and later I found it useful even for normal sysadmin work. For example, I recently was debating a private MPLS network vs flat internet using IPSec for interoffice communication. Searching google for MPLS vs IPSec brought up a handful of opinion pieces that were light on data and facts. After a few searches in one of the scholarly databases though, I found a paper with actual testing and benchmarks, which helped me make my decision. (MPLS won, if you are curious) I find that if you are looking for an erudite and lucid thinker, you need to find the right book. If you are looking for data and statistics and scientific method, papers can't be beat. Be wary though, I feel as if the scrutiny process has gone downhill, and a lot of questionable science makes it though, so be skeptical. I also find the history of scientific papers very interesting, particularly The Royal Society and how, originally, it was purposefully used to control the flow of information to the proletariat. I think this pattern has never fully been broken, and it is why we are seeing/will see an increasingly overt attempt to balkanize and paywall the internet. It must be brought under "control", because it's anarchistic freedom of thought model is a threat to TPTB. This was also a passion of A Swartz.