how to read papers.

after spending the past few years spending countless hours reading a large number of papers, i have formulated a method for spending the least amount of time to go through the paper while still absorbing the vast majority of the content. the strategy for reading each section of the paper is described below:

abstract: the abstract is one of the most important parts of the paper. it concisely summarizes the entire paper. read it thoroughly and you will have a good idea of the general idea of the paper.

introduction: this part of the paper is perhaps the most useless. for the most part, introductions consist of a literature survey and a brief outline of the paper. the outline might be worth looking over quickly, but the literature survey is largely useless as any important research papers you might want to look at are presented in a more clear and organized manner in the references section.

body: this is where many novice readers mistakingly spend a lot of their time perusing. contrary to what the author would like you to think, the body of the paper is comprised of mostly fluff. the only parts worth reading are formulas, graphs and tables and the text that explains them. everything else tends to be either fairly obvious assumptions or opaque attempts of expressing information from graphs and tables in the form of text.

conclusion: this is another very important part of the paper. by reading this part, you will be able to confidently converse with academics on the strengths and weaknesses of the paper as well as possible topics for future research thrusts. nothing helps say that you've read the paper better than reading and quoting random ideas from the conclusion.

references: this section is good for finding the important papers in the field of study. if a paper is important, you will find that it is cited quite often in later papers. besides finding the important papers on a topic, the reference section is good for finding papers that you can pretend that you have read and then proceeding to belittle your colleagues for having not read them. a lot of what academia is, is convincing smart people that you're smarter.

of course, i do not use any such strategy for my classwork/research, but if you ever find yourself in a jam for time, i hope it proves useful.