[robotresearcher]

Good advice. I ran an academic lab for a long time, read and reviewed a lot of papers, and trained students to read them. My process is as follows.

In order, and quickly, I look at the abstract, the picture at the top of page 2 (unless it was on page 1 like vision and graphics papers tend to do), the references, the conclusion, the lit review, if I’m still interested I try to scan the whole thing to decide what the main point of the paper is. Then if I care to, I start again and read it linearly start to finish.

If I’d agreed to review a paper, I don’t get to abort the process. Otherwise I can bail at any step.

[throw_pm23]

It's sad that papers in this area are so standardized in format though. Some of the classic papers break every convention and are written in very idiosyncratic ways. I want to read papers that can be enjoyed slowly and that change my life, not papers where I get trained to read them quickly in a certain way and that have prescribed sections and predictable figures. Life is too short for this rote work.

[idiotsecant]

The paper is a tool for conveying understanding. Standardized tools are a good thing.

[peppery]

Agreed, idiosyncratic voice is so life- and mind- affirming in papers. (Do you mind sharing examples of three papers that you did enjoy slowly and change your conceptual life?)

[nighthawk454]

Nice! Yeah that workflow feels pretty relatable. My other rule of thumb is if it's an architecture paper (system or neural net) without a diagram, I immediately bail haha