How to Read a Paper

How to Read a Paper
This paper describes the `three-pass' approach and its use in doing a literature survey.

THE THREE-PASS APPROACH
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.

The first pass
The first pass is a quick scan to get a bird's-eye view of the paper. 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?

The second pass
1. Look carefully at the figures, diagrams and other illustrations in the paper.
2. Remember to mark relevant unread references for further reading

The second pass should take up to an hour.Sometimes you won't understand a paper even at the end of the second pass. You can now choose to:
(a) set the paper aside, hoping you don't need to understand the material to be successful in your career,
(b) return to the paper later, perhaps after reading background material or
(c) persevere and go on to the third pass.

The third pass

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. During this pass, you should also jot down ideas for future work.