How to Read Academic Papers Effectively
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This document provides tips and strategies for effectively reading academic papers. It discusses deciding what papers to read based on relevance and credibility. It recommends making best use of academic resources like preprint sites, blogs, and mailing lists to stay updated. It explains the importance of reading for breadth to understand the big picture and reading for depth to critically examine assumptions, methods, statistics and conclusions. The document concludes by discussing how to take notes and think creatively after reading papers to develop new research ideas.
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How to Read Academic Papers Effectively
- 1. How to Read Academic Papers? Jia-Bin Huang jbhuang0604@gmail.com http://jbhuang0604.blogspot.com/ January, 2011 Taiwan
- 2. What this talk is about? Efficient and effective paper reading Useful websites, tools, tips you should know A common sense talk
- 3. Paper reading and paper writing "What’s the most resilient parasite?" "An Idea." "A single idea from the human mind can build cities. An idea can transform the world and rewrite all the rules." Papers communicate ideas Reading :: Writing = Extraction :: Inception
- 4. If You don’t read papers...
- 5. Outline 1 Deciding What to Read 2 Make the Best Use of Academic Resources 3 Reading for Breadth and Reading for Depth 4 Summary, Review, and Creative Thinking
- 6. Outline 1 Deciding What to Read 2 Make the Best Use of Academic Resources 3 Reading for Breadth and Reading for Depth 4 Summary, Review, and Creative Thinking
- 7. Deciding what to read Why? Information explosion → too many papers Only very few of them are helpful for your own research
- 8. Deciding what to read How? Evaluate papers by their credibility Select papers by their relevance
- 9. Evaluate papers by credibility How? Venue reputation (journal impact factor, conference ranking) Authors (who, affiliation, order, geneolgy) Completeness (reproducibility)
- 10. Select papers by relevance The key question Why you want to read this paper? (What do you expect from reading this paper?)
- 11. Select papers by relevance Reasons to read papers Get to know a new problem Describe current research Understand a well-known algorithm Follow conventional experiment setup Replicate/extend the results Learn how to write
- 12. Get to know a new problem Questions to ask Why is this problem important/hard? What is the problem setting? (input, output) Search : keywords + tutorial/lecture/course/video/introduction/wiki
- 13. Otherwise...
- 14. Describe current research How? Find key papers and researchers in that area Search : keywords + survey/review/introduction
- 15. Understand a well-known algorithm How? No need to read confusing technical papers Search : keywords + tutorial/introduction/wiki
- 16. Follow conventional experiment setup How? Each field has its own conventional experiment setup. PSNR/Bit-Rate → image/signal compression Precision and recall/ROC curve → pattern recognition algorithms Confusing/matching matrix → supervised/unsupervised learning Search : keywords + experiment/setting/parameter/evaluation/quantitative/qualitative
- 17. Examples PSNR-Bitrate ROC curve Accuracy-Training size Confusion matrix
- 18. Replicate/extend the results How? Papers may provide useful data (or state-of-the-art performance) and serve as building blocks in your research Search : keywords + suvery/review/benchmark/qualitative/study
- 19. Learn how to write Resources The Science of Scientific Writing by George Gopen, Judith Swan Notes on writing by Fredo Durand Writing Research Papers by Aaron Hertzman Advice on Research and Writing at CMU How to Get Rejected by Fabrice Neyret
- 20. Outline 1 Deciding What to Read 2 Make the Best Use of Academic Resources 3 Reading for Breadth and Reading for Depth 4 Summary, Review, and Creative Thinking
- 21. Make the best use of academic resources Why? Well, I am a lazy graduate student...
- 22. Make the best use of academic resources How? Seek other forms of research product Stay updated
- 23. Seek other forms of research product Publication may not be the only product of a research work. What else? Abstract Supplemental material Presentation Demo video Author webpage Project page Code Dataset
- 24. Stay updated How? Websites (research blog/preprint sites/author personal page) Mailing list subscription
- 25. Blog: a new research platform Examples What’s new by Terence Tao, see also his google buzz Godel’s Lost Letter and P=NP by Dick Lipton Machine learning (Theory) by John Langford Nuit Blanche - compressive sensing news ScienceBlogs
- 26. Preprint: get access to the most up-to-date papers Examples arXiv.org: e-prints in physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance and statistics Sciweavers: academic bookmarking network Resource for Computer Graphics/Vision by Ke-Sen Huang Author personal page
- 27. Mailing list subscription Examples Imageworld: announce worldwide events and academic vacancies MIT CSAIL Seminar UC Berkely computer vision mailing list
- 28. Outline 1 Deciding What to Read 2 Make the Best Use of Academic Resources 3 Reading for Breadth and Reading for Depth 4 Summary, Review, and Creative Thinking
- 29. Reading for breadth Build a framework What did they do? (by skimming abstract, introduction, headings, graphics, definitions, conclusions and bibliography) Decide whether to go on
- 30. Reading for breadth Order matters Extract the high-level idea first, then the details
- 31. Reading for depth Challenge what you read How did they do it? How can I apply their approach to my work?
- 32. Reading for depth Scientific skepticism Examine the (implicit) assumptions Examine the methods Examine the statistics Examine the conclusions
- 33. Examine the (implicit) assumptions Questions to ask Do their results rely on any assumptions about trends or environments? Are these assumptions reasonable?
- 34. Examine the methods Questions to ask Did they measure what they claim? Can they explain what they observed? Did they have adequate controls? Were tests carried out in a standard way?
- 35. Examine the statistics Questions to ask Were appropriate statistical tests applied properly? Did they do proper error analysis? Are the results statistically significant?
- 36. Examine the conclusions Questions to ask Do the conclusions follow logically from the observations? What other explanations are there for the observed effects? What other conclusions or correlations are there in the data that they did not point out?
- 37. Outline 1 Deciding What to Read 2 Make the Best Use of Academic Resources 3 Reading for Breadth and Reading for Depth 4 Summary, Review, and Creative Thinking
- 38. After reading the paper... How? React to what you read Creative thinking
- 39. React to what you read Taking Notes Highlight major points React to the points in the paper Construct your own example Summarize what you read
- 40. React to what you read Analogy: Gram-Schmidt process Papers :: Reading = Vectors :: Orthogonalization Extract the “innovation" of the paper.
- 41. Creative thinking Resources How to come up with new research ideas by Jia-Bin Huang How to invent? Raskar idea hexagon by Ramesh Raskar
- 42. Creative thinking Five ways to come up with new ideas Seek different dimension Combine two or more topics Re-think the research directions Use powerful tools, find suitable problems Add an appropriate adjective
- 43. One example - Content-aware image resizing [Avidan and Shamir SIGGRAPH 2007] Idea Resize (reduce/expand) images while preserving the image content. The dimension: space
- 44. Video retargeting [Shamir et al. SIGGRAPH 2008] Idea Extend dimensions from 2D image to 3D video: image resizing → video resizing The dimension: space
- 45. Nonchronological video synopsis and indexing [Pritch et al. PAMI 2008] Idea Resizing (reduce) the temporal dimension. The dimension: time
- 46. Data-driven enhancement of facial attractiveness [Leyvand et al. SIGGRAPH 2008] Idea Reshape the face to enhance attractiveness The dimensions: distances between facial feature points
- 47. Parametric reshaping of human bodies in images [Zhou et al. SIGGRAPH 2010] Idea Reshape the human bodies in image The dimensions: human shape
- 48. Multi-operator media retargeting [Rubinstein et al. SIGGRAPH 2009] Idea Combine seam carving with cropping and scaling to produce better results
- 49. Regenerative morphing [Shechtman et al. CVPR 2010] Idea Combine two different problem: image morphing + image resizing
- 50. A Comparative Study of Image Retargeting [Rubinstein et al. SIGGRAPH 2010] Idea Provide the comprehensive perceptual study and analysis of image retargeting
- 51. PatchMatch [Barnes et al. SIGGRAPH 2009] Idea Add constraint into the resizing process Adjective: Constrained
- 52. Motion-aware video resizing [Wang et al. SIGGRAPH 2010] [Wang et al. SIGGRAPH Asia 2010] Idea Exploit motion information for better video resizing quality Adjective: Motion-aware
- 53. References Paper reading How to read a paper by S. Kesha How to Read a Scientific Paper by John W. Little and Roy Parker Efficient Reading of Papers in Science and Technology by Michael J. Hanson How to read a research paper by Michael Mitzenmacher Tools Publish or Perish (a program that analyzes academic citations) Mendeley (Academic reference management software) VideoLectures.NET (Free on-demand educational video lectures)
- 54. For more complete materials and explanations, please visit my blog Redefining Open Mind: http://jbhuang0604.blogspot.com/