<story><title>How to seriously read a scientific paper</title><url>https://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2016/03/how-seriously-read-scientific-paper</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ramraj07</author><text>By the time I was in year 4 of my PhD, reading a paper mostly involved: look at title, directly look at figure 1 and figure 8 to judge if the title actually matches the result. If the result is of genuine interest then read the abstract, and then go through the figures carefully. Otherwise for the most part the reminder of the paper is left alone. This only applies for papers where I already know the field and am only trying to gauge the incremental addition to the knowledge the paper makes. The style will be different for a paper in an unknown field, there it&amp;#x27;s best to just read it as prose from top to bottom with a marker at hand.&lt;p&gt;To add more - not reading any text in the paper makes you laser focussed on trying to  figure out what the data means without the authors trying to sugar coat anything with their perspective&amp;#x2F;agenda.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dekhn</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve had many people suggest just reading the figures, but I&amp;#x27;ve found that most scientists hide their sins in the methods section, and the figures &lt;i&gt;cannot&lt;/i&gt; be properly interpreted without careful inspection of the methods (which often demonstrates the authors didn&amp;#x27;t really do a good job).&lt;p&gt;Also, I&amp;#x27;ve noticed that a very large range of papers with faked image data in figures has gone unnoticed by most readers.  People look at the figures hoping to see what they want to see and aren&amp;#x27;t critical enough about the process used to generate them (when I wrote my phd thesis, all figures were programmatically generated by version-controlled code on well-managed data.</text></comment>
<story><title>How to seriously read a scientific paper</title><url>https://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2016/03/how-seriously-read-scientific-paper</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ramraj07</author><text>By the time I was in year 4 of my PhD, reading a paper mostly involved: look at title, directly look at figure 1 and figure 8 to judge if the title actually matches the result. If the result is of genuine interest then read the abstract, and then go through the figures carefully. Otherwise for the most part the reminder of the paper is left alone. This only applies for papers where I already know the field and am only trying to gauge the incremental addition to the knowledge the paper makes. The style will be different for a paper in an unknown field, there it&amp;#x27;s best to just read it as prose from top to bottom with a marker at hand.&lt;p&gt;To add more - not reading any text in the paper makes you laser focussed on trying to  figure out what the data means without the authors trying to sugar coat anything with their perspective&amp;#x2F;agenda.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>GirkovArpa</author><text>As a layman my impression is most papers are too verbose. At least the ones that I can understand.  After reading tons of steganography papers (for example) I found they tend to begin with the same retelling of the history of steganography from the beginning of time up to now, even though it&amp;#x27;s completely irrelevant to the topic of the paper (which is not history).</text></comment>