How To Find, Read, And Master Research Papers
Table of Contents
1. Step 1: How To Find Research Papers
- Twitter: You can keep updated by following related researchers. For example, Andrew Ng usually tweets about recent Conferences, new courses, and topics.
- ArXiv
- Google Scholar
- Research Gate
- Top Conferences
You will be more successful if you read steadily rather than putting an intense effort over one weekend.
– Andrew Ng
2. Step 2: How to Read a research paper
Pete Carr recommends students to have a notebook or index cards to summarize and note important parts of each paper, so you can refer to that whenever you want to have a quick review of the papers you have read.
The faintest ink is more powerful than the strongest memory.
– Chinese proverb
2.1. Be sure why you are reading this paper
2.2. Dive into the paper
Three stages:
- the first is just to get the gist of the paper,
- the second is for understanding it
- the third one which is described in the third section is for mastering the paper.
2.2.1. The Bird’s-eye View of the paper
- The first stage is looking at the title, affiliation Yannic usually skips the authors’ section because he cannot memorize all of the authors and the most famous authors work in a huge lab so it will not mean that the paper is going to be of any good or bad.
- Abstract : In this section along with the introduction and the conclusion, authors try to convince reviewers that their work deserves to be accepted in their journal or conference.
- Figures : The next step is looking at the figures. Andrew Ng says that especially in Deep Learning, there are a lot of research papers where sort of the entire paper is summarized in one or two figures in the figure caption.
2.2.2. Intro/Conclusions/Tables + Skim the rest
- Spend short period to grasp the big picture of the paper and Do not engage with details.
- Introduction and conclusion are the best sections for these goals.
- The tables also provide the result of the work in a coherent structure.
- Next, you should skim through the section titles and subsections, and after that, You should decide whether to leave the paper or continue reading it
2.2.3. Read 10 paper superficially than one paper in-depth
Andrew Ng suggests reading 10% of some related papers, and then decide to read one completely, add some more related papers based on the citations of the read one, and continue this cycle until you are satisfied with the subject you are learning about.
Jeff Dean also expressed that he’d rather read ten papers superficially than one paper in-depth to get as much inspiration as possible.
He also conceded that reading 100 abstracts might be even better.
2.2.4. Leave Details for later
Remember that you are reading the paper to answer your questions, and you should now focus on how you can use the information from this paper yourself. Abstraction might help you in this case. For example, if the authors are using a complex optimization method that is not familiar to you, you can look at it just as an optimization method, not more. If you need more detail, you can search or read about it later.
3. Step 3: The final step is to re-implement the paper.
If you are dealing with math, you should be able to re-derive it from scratch. If you are dealing with code, you should implement it yourself from scratch.
