How to Read an Engineering Research Paper
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2008-10-17
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How to Read an Engineering Research Paper
William G. Griswold
CSE, UC San Diego
Reading research papers effectively is challenging. These papers are written
in a very condensed style because of page limitations and the intended
audience, which is assumed to already know the area well. Moreover, the
reasons for writing the paper may be different than the reasons the paper has
been assigned, meaning you have to work harder to find the content that you
are interested in. Finally, your time is very limited, so you may not have time
to read every word of the paper or read it several times to extract all the
nuances. For all these reasons, reading a research paper can require a
special approach.
To develop an effective reading style for research papers, it can help to know
two things: what you should get out of the paper, and where that information
is located in the paper. First, I'll describe how a typical research paper is put
together.
Despite a paper's condensed form, it is likely repetitive. The introduction will
state not only the motivations behind the work, but also outline the solution.
Often this may be all the expert requires from the paper. The body of the
paper states the authors' solution to the problem in detail, and should also
describe a detailed evaluation of the solution in terms of arugments or an
experiment. Finally, the paper will conclude with a recap, including a
discussion of the primary contributions. A paper will also discuss related work
to some degree. Because of the repetition in these papers at different levels
of detail and from different perspectives, it may be desirable, to read the
paper ``out of order'' or to skip certain sections. More on this below.
The questions you want to have answered by reading a paper are the
following:
1. What are motivations for this work? For a research paper, there is
an expectation that a problem has been solved that no one else has
published in the literature. This problem intrinsically has two parts. The
first is often unstated, what I call the people problem. The people
problem is the benefits that are desired in the world at large; for
example some issue of quality of life, such as saved time or increased
safety. The second part is the technical problem, which is: why
doesn't the people problem not have a trivial solution? There is also an
implication that previous solutions to the problem are inadequate. What
are the previous solutions and why are they inadequate? Finally, the
motivation and statement of the problem are distilled into a research
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