How to Read an Engineering Research Paper

How to Read an Engineering Research Paper

William G. Griswold
Department of Computer Science & Engineering
University of California, San Diego

Two things:

• what you should get out from the paper
  
• where that information is located in the paper

Answer the questions by reading a paper

• What are the motivations for this work? (introduction)
  
• What is the proposed solution? (hypothsis or idea) (introduction, conclusion)
  
• What is the work’s evaluation of the proposed solution?
  
• What is your analysis of the identified problem, idea and evolution?
  
• What are the contributions? (ideas, software, experimental techniques, area survey)
  
• What are future directions for this research? (conclusion)
  
• What questions are you left with?
  
• What is your take-away messages from this paper?

be aware of the context of the paper in relation to other papers

write an abstract by self

take time to write down questions

advice on note taking: annotating on the paper directly

• highlight important comments as you go.
  
• mark the important paragraphs of the paper: motivation/problem, ides/solution, evaluation, contributions.
  
• on the front of the paper, write down the take-away message.
  
• on the front of the paper, or near the end, write down your questions.
  
• try to answers for yourself, by Google.

a second pass