读书 谋生 涅磐

• Carefully read the title, abstract and introduction;
• Read the section and sub-section headings, but ignore everything else;
  Read the conclusions;
• Glance over the references, mentally ticking off the ones you’ve already read.
• Questions bearing in mind:

--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 this paper well written?

Pass Two: Understand the paper’s content, but not its details;

• Look carefully at the figures, diagrams and other illustrations
  in the paper. Pay special attention to graphs. Are the
  axes properly labeled? Are results shown with error bars,
  so that conclusions are statistically significant? Common
  mistakes like these will separate rushed, shoddy work from
  the truly excellent;
• Remember to mark relevant unread references for further
  reading (this is a good way to learn more about the background
  of the paper).

The second pass should take up to an hour. After this pass:

• You should be able to grasp the content of the paper;
• You should be able to summarize the main trust of the paper,
  with supporting evidence, to someone else. This level
  of detail is appropriate for a paper in which you are interested,
  but does not lie in your research speciality.

Pass Three: Capture any details of the paper in depth.

The key to the third pass is to attempt to virtually reimplement
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.

• You should be able to reconstruct the entire structure of
  the paper from points;
• In particular, you should be able to pinpoint implicit assumptions,
  missing citations to relevant work, and potential
  issues with experimental or analytical techniques.

Composing Literature Survey

Step 1: Use an academic search engine such as Google Scholar
or CiteSeer and some well-chosen keywords to find three
to five recent papers in the area. Do one pass on each
paper to get a sense of the work, then read their related
work sections. You will find a thumbnail summary of the
recent work, and perhaps, if you are lucky, a pointer to a
recent survey paper. If you can find such a survey, you are
done. Read the survey, congratulating yourself on your
good luck.

Step 2: Find shared citations and repeated author names in the
bibliography, which are the key papers and researchers in
that area. Download the key papers and set them aside.
Then go to the website of the key researchers and see
where they’ve published recently. That will help you identify
the top conferences in that field because the best researchers
usually publish in the top conferences.

Step 3: Go to the website for these top conferences and look
through their recent proceedings. A quick scan will usually
identify recent high-quality related work. These papers,
along with the ones you set aside earlier, constitute
the first version of your survey. Make two passes through
these papers. If they all cite a key paper that you did not
find earlier, obtain and read it, iterating as necessary.