How to Read a Research Paper
Among the questions that you should ask yourself when reading a research paper are the following:
- What is the research paradigm that the author is using? Example paradigms are psychological experiments, formalization and theorem proving, and artifact design and construction. If the paper is part of a well established field, you should describe the field and its current state.
- What is the problem area with which the paper is concerned? For example, "Automatic Generation of Compilers from Denotational Semantic Descriptions of the Source Code" would describe a research paper on compilation.
- What is the author's thesis? That is, what is he/she trying to convince you of?
- Summarize the author's argument. That is, how does the author go about trying to convince you of the thesis?
- Does the author describe other work in the field? If so, how does the research described in the paper differ from the other work?
- Does the paper succeed? Are you convinced of the thesis by the time that you have finished reading the paper?
- Does the author indicate how the work should be followed up on? Does the paper generate new ideas.
- Some papers implicitly or explicitly provide a new way of doing things or of thinking about problems. If your paper does so, describe the approach.
© 1995, Dr. Spencer Rugaber