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by fedorova
1617 days ago
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I am a scientist and I have to read sometimes hundreds of pages of dense scientific literature in a given week while doing other things that my job requires. I also find reading long difficult text to be hard. However, over the years I found two things that allowed me to get better at it: 1. Just read A LOT. There is no way around it. If you push yourself to do this, eventually your mind will figure out a way. 2. Markup the text you are reading. I do this on an iPad with a stylus. I underline key points, circle important paragraphs, jot down a quick summary of lengthy thoughts. Good luck! |
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Part of what slows people down reading scientific papers is akin to that person's absorptive capacity. When you start reading something, you come in with a host of prior knowledge: terms, phrases, principles, etc that you know and understand. The more of these things you have when reading relevant to the piece you're reading, the more quickly you can read, digest, critize, etc.
I've read this particular GFS paper a long time ago and this is a domain I can read through fairly rapidly (pro tip: read the abstract and conclusions first to make sure it's worth your time to read the meat of the paper given academic incentives to publish anything anymore).
I've worked with some medical professionals doing work on partial arthroplasty related techniques (adding 3D volume reconstructive techniques) and the paper took me forever to get through and contribute to because like you, every paragraph was me looking up medical terminology and trying to incorporate that into my baseline knowledge. My absorptive capacity was very low in that context.
In general, the more generalized scientific knowledge you have, the easier it is to pickup and read these papers quickly (if they've been written for a general scientific audience). If they're CS papers, clearly CS foundations help (theory, nomenclature, current and past popular trends, etc.).