Paper Note: How to Read a Paper

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

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:

• Carefully read the title, abstract, and introduction.
• Read the section and sub-section headings.
• Read the conclusions.
• 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:

• Category: What type of paper is this? A measurement paper? An analysis of an existing system? A description of a research prototype?
• Context: Which other papers is it related to? Which theoretical bases were used to analyze the problem?
• Correctness: Do the assumptions appear to be valid?
• Contributions: What are the paper’s main contributions?
• Clarity: Is the paper well written?

The first pass is adequate for papers that aren’t in your research area, but may someday prove relevant.

The Second Pass

The second pass should take up to an hour.

Read the paper with greater care, but ignore details such as proofs:

• Look carefully at the figures, diagrams and other illustrations in the paper.
• Remember to mark relevant unread references for further reading.

This level of detail is appropriate for a paper in which you are interested, but does not lie in your research speciality.

Sometimes you won’t understand a paper even at the end of the second pass. This may be because the subject matter is new to you, with unfamiliar terminology and acronyms.

The 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 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.