Questions for Reading a Paper

TUT 100 - Virtue in Animal and Machine - Professor Weinman

Primary scholarly literature across disciplines varies greatly in intent, methods, and structure. However, good works do have several properties in common, regardless of discipline. The writers should be engaged in a conversation with others (whether historic or contemporaneous) and proposing an idea, explanation, solution, or mechanism that contributes to our understanding in some new way. Given these commonalities, it helps to be able to read a paper for a few principle bits of information:

What question does it address? What problem is it trying to solve?
Why is the question or problem important?
What do we currently understand about solving the problem? What approaches have been taken to answer the question?
What are the limitations of these solutions or approaches?
What are the authors' goals?
(If appropriate) Does the paper have a scientific thesis? Is it falsifiable? (That is, could an experimental outcome disprove it?)
What are the paper's claims?
Are these claims substantiated (either by argument, theory, or experiment)?
What are the limitations of the proposed approach?
Are there ways to extend the method?

Note that answers to some of these questions you might expect to be found within the text, while others will require you to think critically for yourself. Even for those that do appear within the text, it is still valuable for you to read what is said with a critical eye.

In addition to looking for answers to these questions, you should continue and expand your practice of writing definitions, making notes, asking questions, and other engaging activities in the margins of the paper. Make your marks add to the paper, not just highlight what it already says.

Acknowledgment

The questions above are inspired by and/or adapted from those given by Fong [1] and Keshav [2].

References

[1]: Philip W.L. Fong. Reading a computer science research paper. SIGCSE Bulletin, 41(2):138-140, 2009.
[2]: S. Keshav. How to read a paper. SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 37(3):83-84, 2007.