How to Read a Paper Efficiently (By Prof. Pete Carr)

you

hi I'm professor Pete Carr I'm been at

the University of Minnesota for about

thirty-eight years I've worked with many

many graduate students in class and in

my research lab and I find it useful to

work with students um to teach them how

to read a paper on this first slide that

I want to show you is an outline of of

the way a typical scientific paper is

organized and I think most beginning

students instinctively start reading a

paper in in order as the paper is

printed for instance they read the title

then they go on to the abstract then

they read the introduction and so on and

so forth

working their way from the beginning to

the end of the article don't do this

this is not a good use of your time

there's a better way to do things which

is what I'm going to tell you about

today let me jump in here at this point

and tell you about a fairly simple

algorithm if you will about how to get

the most out of a paper with with the

least effort and I think to do this you

have to think of reading a paper as a

two-phase process in the first phase

you're surveying the paper the article

to see if it's really worth investing a

lot of time in and this is the way you

you keep up with what's going on in in

the literature you'll probably have some

sort of service that provides you with

with papers based upon keywords which

are by and large taken from the abstract

of of the paper off so the first step

to keep more first thing to keep in mind

is that you're allowed to stop this

process at any point when you become

disinterested in going further next you

will look undoubtedly at the key words

and and the title of the paper if these

don't interest you at all you stop next

thing to look at really is the abstract

it's the most important part of the

paper for getting acquainted with the

paper but next I think you want to jump

to the conclusions you don't read the

intermediate steps you don't look at the

experimental and the introduction and

the results and discussion look at the

conclusions because if the conclusions

are not relevant to you

probably you don't want to go any

further so that this basically at this

point you've surveyed the paper and you

know whether or not it's really worth

your while to invest any time on it the

next thing that I think it's best to do

again because it's fairly fast is to

take a good look at the tables and the

figures and the captions because you can

do this quickly and it will tell you the

main things that went on when the when

the scientists did their work and again

it will help you decide do I really want

to dig into this paper or not if that's

the case and you want to dig in then the

place to start is the introduction and

this unit have to start reading

seriously and the introduction will

provide you with essential background

information that's one of the roles of

the introduction another role of the

introduction is to let you know why the

authors of the paper did did the

particular study and I think these are

important things for you to know before

digging in the real heart of a paper is

the results and discussion section of

the paper here's where you're going to

spend most of your time and going

through the paper finally

at this point you may decide to stop

you've had enough but if the paper is

really extremely relevant to what you

are currently working on then it's time

to dig very deeply and get into the

details of the experimental section of

the paper and this is where you really

learn what the authors actually did but

more importantly it's how you it's where

you learn how they did things and you

may need that level of detail in your

own work um once once you've done

reading the paper uh you can you can

stop however I think it's a really good

idea to develop some kind of system

where you take some notes on the paper

these notes aren't going to serve you

any good next week or maybe even next

month but down the road maybe when you

start to write your own first paper

having some notes on these papers that

you've read will be very beneficial and

will really save you a lot of time it'll

tell you which papers you should reread

before you start writing which papers

you don't need to include in as

references in your own manuscript

because they're not relevant so taking

some notes when you can as you finish

reading a paper is a really good idea

and and these notes should be in a

notebook or in some system and not

simply written on the PDF of the paper

because that you can't collect those

those notes very easily you want these

notes readily accessible for instance on

an index card or a bunch of index cards

so that you can flip through them

quickly and take a look at all the all

the relevant papers there's an old

saying

I think it's Chinese in origin that the

faintest writing is better than the best

memory and in the course of my time

involved in science I am here to

tell you that's that old saying is

really right these are the main things I

wanted to leave you with reading a paper

or surveying a paper may take 30 seconds

or if it's really relevant it may take

several days several hours or even the

major part of a day to go through the

entire manuscript and really come to

grips with it that's that's about all I

can tell you it's a it's a skill that

has to be learned to be productive in

graduate school and productive as a

research scientist