Master Your Research Paper Reading Skills

A researcher reading a paper is not studying for an exam; there is rarely a need to understand every line. The number of papers that a researcher working on a particular project has to know well is usually small, even though the number the researcher should have read to establish their relevance is large. Thus it is important to become an ______ reader, by giving each paper neither more nor less time that it deserves. The first time you read a paper, skim through it to identify the extent to which it is relevant—only read it thoroughly if there is likely to be value in doing so. Make the effort to properly understand the details, but always beware of details that may be wrong, or garbled. Expect to have a range of modes of reading: browsing to find papers and get an overview of activity and to understand the main outcomes in a body of work; background reading of texts and popular science magazines; and thorough, focused reading of key or complex papers that stretch your abilities or the limits of your understanding. But don’t allow reading to develop into a form of procrastination—it needs to be part of a productive cycle of work, not a dominant use of time.