基本上與陳老師的說法並無二致，僅供參考。
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How to Read a Paper
S. Keshav
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo
Waterloo, ON, Canada
keshav@uwaterloo.ca
ABSTRACT
Researchers spend a great deal of time reading research papers. However, this
skill is rarely taught, leading to much wasted effort. This article outlines
a practical and efficient three-pass method for reading research papers. I
also describe how to use this method to do a literature survey.
Categories and Subject Descriptors: A.1 [Introductory and Survey]
General Terms: Documentation.
Keywords: Paper, Reading, Hints.
1. INTRODUCTION
Researchers must read papers for several reasons: to review them for a
conference or a class, to keep current in their field, or for a literature
survey of a new field. A typical researcher will likely spend hundreds of
hours every year reading papers.
Learning to efficiently read a paper is a critical but rarely taught skill.
Beginning graduate students, therefore, must learn on their own using trial
and error. Students waste much effort in the process and are frequently
driven to frustration.
For many years I have used a simple approach to efficiently read papers. This
paper describes the 'three-pass' approach and its use in doing a literature
survey.
2. THE THREE-PASS APPROACH
The key idea is that you should read the paper in up to three passes, instead
of starting at the beginning and plowing your way to the end. Each pass
accomplishes specific goals and builds upon the previous pass: The first pass
gives you a general idea about the paper. The second pass lets you grasp the
paper's content, but not its details. The third pass helps you understand the
paper in depth.
2.1 The first pass
The first pass is a quick scan to get a bird's-eye view of the paper. You can
also decide whether you need to do any more passes. This pass should take
about five to ten minutes and consists of the following steps:
1. Carefully read the title, abstract, and introduction
2. Read the section and sub-section headings, but ignore everything else
3. Read the conclusions
4. Glance over the references, mentally ticking off the ones you've already
read
At the end of the first pass, you should be able to answer the five Cs:
1. Category: What type of paper is this? A measurement paper? An analysis of
an existing system? A description of a research prototype?
2. Context: Which other papers is it related to? Which theoretical bases were
used to analyze the problem?
3. Correctness: Do the assumptions appear to be valid?
4. Contributions: What are the paper’s main contributions?
5. Clarity: Is the paper well written?
Using this information, you may choose not to read further. This could be
because the paper doesn't interest you, or you don't know enough about the
area to understand the paper, or that the authors make invalid assumptions.
The first pass is adequate for papers that aren't in your research area, but
may someday prove relevant.
Incidentally, when you write a paper, you can expect most reviewers (and
readers) to make only one pass over it. Take care to choose coherent section
and sub-section titles and to write concise and comprehensive abstracts. If a
reviewer cannot understand the gist after one pass, the paper will likely be
rejected; if a reader cannot understand the high-lights of the paper after
five minutes, the paper will likely never be read.
2.2 The second pass
In the second pass, read the paper with greater care, but ignore details such
as proofs. It helps to jot down the key points, or to make comments in the
margins, as you read.
1. Look carefully at the figures, diagrams and other illustrations in the
paper. Pay special attention to graphs. Are the axes properly labeled? Are
results shown with error bars, so that conclusions are statistically
significant? Common mistakes like these will separate rushed, shoddy work
from the truly excellent.
2. Remember to mark relevant unread references for further reading (this is a
good way to learn more about the background of the paper).
2.3 The third pass
To fully understand a paper, particularly if you are reviewer, requires a
third pass. The key to the third pass is to attempt to virtually re-implement
the paper: that is, making the same assumptions as the authors, re-create the
work. By comparing this re-creation with the actual paper, you can easily
identify not only a paper's innovations, but also its hidden failings and
assumptions.
This pass requires great attention to detail. You should identify and
challenge every assumption in every statement. Moreover, you should think
about how you yourself would present a particular idea. This comparison of
the actual with the virtual lends a sharp insight into the proof and
presentation techniques in the paper and you can very likely add this to your
repertoire of tools. During this pass, you should also jot down ideas for
future work.
This pass can take about four or five hours for beginners, and about an hour
for an experienced reader. At the end of this pass, you should be able to
reconstruct the entire structure of the paper from memory, as well as be able
to identify its strong and weak points. In particular, you should be able to
pinpoint implicit assumptions, missing citations to relevant work, and
potential issues with experimental or analytical techniques.
3. DOING A LITERATURE SURVEY
Paper reading skills are put to the test in doing a literature survey. This
will require you to read tens of papers, perhaps in an unfamiliar field. What
papers should you read? Here is how you can use the three-pass approach to
help.
First, use an academic search engine such as Google Scholar or CiteSeer and
some well-chosen keywords to find three to five recent papers in the area. Do
one pass on each paper to get a sense of the work, then read their related
work sections. You will find a thumbnail summary of the recent work, and
perhaps, if you are lucky, a pointer to a recent survey paper. If you can
find such a survey, you are done. Read the survey, congratulating yourself on
your good luck.
Otherwise, in the second step, find shared citations and repeated author
names in the bibliography. These are the key papers and researchers in that
area. Download the key papers and set them aside. Then go to the websites of
the key researchers and see where they've published recently. That will help
you identify the top conferences in that field because the best researchers
usually publish in the top conferences.
The third step is to go to the website for these top conferences and look
through their recent proceedings. A quick scan will usually identify recent
high-quality related work. These papers, along with the ones you set aside
earlier, constitute the first version of your survey. Make two passes through
these papers. If they all cite a key paper that you did not find earlier,
obtain and read it, iterating as necessary.
4. EXPERIENCE
I've used this approach for the last 15 years to read conference proceedings,
write reviews, do background research, and to quickly review papers before a
discussion. This disciplined approach prevents me from drowning in the
details before getting a bird's-eye-view. It allows me to estimate the amount
of time required to review a set of papers. Moreover, I can adjust the depth
of paper evaluation depending on my needs and how much time I have.
5. RELATED WORK
If you are reading a paper to do a review, you should also read Timothy
Roscoe's paper on "Writing reviews for systems conferences" [1]. If you're
planning to write a technical paper, you should refer both to Henning
Schulzrinne's comprehensive web site [2] and George Whitesides's excellent
overview of the process [3].
6. A REQUEST
I would like to make this a living document, updating it as I receive
comments. Please take a moment to email me any comments or suggestions for
improvement. You can also add comments at CCRo, the online edition of CCR [4].
7. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The first version of this document was drafted by my students: Hossein Falaki,
Earl Oliver, and Sumair Ur Rahman. My thanks to them. I also benefited from
Christophe Diot's perceptive comments and Nicole Keshav's eagle-eyed copy-
editing.
This work was supported by grants from the National Science and Engineering
Council of Canada, the Canada Research Chair Program, Nortel Networks,
Microsoft, Intel Corporation, and Sprint Corporation.
8. REFERENCES
[1] T. Roscoe, "Writing Reviews for Systems Conferences,"
http://people.inf.ethz.ch/troscoe/pubs/review-writing.pdf .
[2] H. Schulzrinne, "Writing Technical Articles,"
http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~hgs/etc/writing-style.html .
[3] G.M. Whitesides, "Whitesides' Group: Writing a Paper,"
http://www.che.iitm.ac.in/misc/dd/writepaper.pdf .
[4] ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review Online,
http://www.sigcomm.org/ccr/drupal/ .
ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review
Volume 37, Number 3, July 2007, 83-84