how to read research papers, in 5 minutes. | writing

My top learnings aggregated into a short guide.

TLDR: There are way too many papers to afford reading slowly (most are incremental or poorly written), and you need to see lots before the patterns emerge. Unless you’re brand new to a field [ 1 ] , I recommend honing the skill of moving quickly through many papers and only revisiting the good ones. Intended for readers of all backgrounds, from first paper to many. Distilled from my own and fellow researchers’ experience in the machine learning (ML) field, though these principles should apply broadly. From what I can tell, most people aren’t taught how to read research papers. Inside academia

related reading

• How to Read a Paperweb.stanford.edu
• How to win a best paper award (or, an opinionated take on how to do important research)nicholas.carlini.com
• An Opinionated Guide to ML Researchjoschu.net
• How to Read Scientific Papers Quickly and Effectivelyfrancescolelli.info
• Highly Opinionated Advice on How to Write ML Papers — LessWronglesswrong.com
• Lessons from My First 8 Years of Research | Tom Silvertomsilver.github.io
• Tips for Empirical Alignment Research — AI Alignment Forumalignmentforum.org
• an-unsolicited-guide-to-good-research.pdfemerge-lab.github.io
• Mert R. Sabuncu 🤖🩻⚕️ on X: "Some advice I give my graduate students about how to keep on top of the literature in their field. A 🧵: 1/" / Xtwitter.com
• A Survival Guide to a PhDkarpathy.github.io
• The myth of the myth of the well read persondwarkeshpatel.com
• Templates for machine learning research papers | Neel Guhaneelguha.github.io