[Paper Review] How to Read a Paper?

The author mainly talks about his "3-pass" guidelines for efficient paper reading in this paper. The audience he targets on is graduate students who has just started doing researches, but not limited to. I will summarize the 3-passes here along with my own opinion:

The first pass is to skim over the whole paper, partly like a common people without background knowledge would do. In this pass, one looks at abstracts, introductions, figures and tables to get a roughly understanding about this paper. The author suggests this fast pass to be a good indicator for further "action", either taking one step ahead or putting it aside the desk. One important thing I have learned from this section is that one should put more emphasis on those parts when writing paper, otherwise it would keep readers away from your clever ideas.

In the second pass, the author expects us to read a paper "as we usually do". This includes a complete go-through of the paper and to think over the main ideas proposed. A common mistake I often commit is to read every paper I find to this depth, which is very time expensive if it is not really useful. Nevertheless, I think a careful reading is still necessary(and usually proves to be) for many papers we decide to click "download".

If we really find something beneficial to our work and just don't feel enough after the second pass, the third pass would be a perfect end for our need. The author recommend to virtually re-implement the paper in your mind, so that you can re-create the work using the same assumption. I totally agree with him at this point. Not until pen and paper or codes are reached, we seldom truly understand the deep meaning hidden in the paper.

At last, the author also talks about general flows to do survey for a unfamiliar field. One thing I would like to highlight here is to browse key researcher's website for a whole picture about how this field is going on. It is often much more easy to do it this way than to scan proceedings' website...