Advice on Reading Academic Research Papers

Reading research papers effectively can seem daunting at first, but can be mastered with practice. To really understand a standard length academic paper, expect to spend an hour reading and thinking about it. Before you start reading, it helps to explicitly think about (i) what you want to get from the paper, and (ii) where that information is usually located in the paper. This article outlines how to extract the gist of a paper, how to read critically, and how to use the paper as a way to start thinking creatively in the research area.

Reading to extract information:

Generally, papers from the domain of Social Computing (and HCI more generally) are structured very similarly. This outlines what type of information you’re likely to find in each section:

  • Abstract: brief, high-level understanding of what problem the paper aims to solve, their approach, and main contributions and/or results.

  • Introduction: describes the motivation for the paper, and briefly outlines the research questions, approach or solution, and main contributions

  • Related Work: evaluates all comparative work and solutions in the research area and related areas in detail

  • Body of the paper:

    • Solution: describes the authors’ solution/approach to the problem in detail, or

    • Method: the design of the study to either gather user needs or evaluate the solution with the procedure and apparatus

  • Results: presents major results of the study.

  • Discussion: recap of results, discussion of how the results/solution compares with existing related work, limitations, future work, and main contributions of the paper

  • References: a good place to find further reading for related work if you want to read more in the area.

Note: Not all papers have the exact same sections, also not always in the same order. Information may be repeated across sections with different amounts of detail.

Reading critically:

Reading a paper is not just to extract information, but to critically reflect on the assumptions, methods, and results. One way to start thinking critically is by questioning the paper. Here are the 5 fundamental questions to consider when reading, including the sections where you’re likely to find the answers to these questions:

  1. What are the motivations and rationale for doing this work? (see the paper's Introduction)

  2. What is the proposed solution? (see the paper's brief description in the Introduction and a detailed version in the body of the paper)

  3. What is the work's evaluation of the proposed solution? (see if the paper has an Evaluation or Results section, also read the discussion)

  4. What are the contributions? (typically these are outlined in the Introduction, discussed in detail in the Discussion section)

  5. 5. What are future directions for this research? (see the Discussion section)

Reading creatively:

Reading a paper critically is easy, in that it is always easier to tear something down than to build it up. Reading creatively involves harder, more positive thinking. Try answering these questions and taking notes as you go through the paper:

  1. What are the good ideas in this paper? Do these ideas have other applications or extensions that the authors might not have thought of? Can the results be generalized further? Are there possible improvements that might make important practical differences?

  2. How would you approach/answer this problem statement? If you were going to start doing research from this paper, what would be the next thing you would do?

  3. How does this paper relate to other papers that we’ve been reading? Sometimes you find that they might have a different problem and approach, define the problem differently, or approach the same problem uniquely?

  4. How does this paper relate to what we’ve been discussing in class and in the current socio-political-economic environment?

References:

Griswold, W G. How to read an Engineering Research Paper. https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~wgg/CSE210/howtoread.html.

Mitzenmacher, Michael. How to Read a Research Paper. www.eecs.harvard.edu/~michaelm/postscripts/ReadPaper.pdf.

Keshav, S. (2007). How to read a paper. ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 37(3), 83-84.


What are some ways you effectively read papers? We would love to hear your methods! Please share your advice on Slack or during class. It will help us all read papers more effectively.