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Comment by jorgemf | Hacker News Reader

You can read one paper a day, but I am not sure you can understand one paper a day.

At least for me during my PhD I spent more than a full-time day to completely understand papers that were interesting for my research.

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I'd state it with a bit more nuance.

From my experience in physics:

You can read a paper in 15-30 minutes and get the main points and contributions.

For good papers, you can spend multiple days to really understand the paper.

And for really good papers you can spends months to completely understand them, then extend them, and then publish your dissertation.

My bet is OP meant the surface read. I'd say that's a fine thing to do.

i feel like you could read the summary section and the results section in about 15 minutes.

Reminds me of the 3 pass approach in the paper, "How to read a paper"

http://blizzard.cs.uwaterloo.ca/keshav/home/Papers/data/07/p...

I've found that there's generally two levels of paper understanding. The first is achievable in a day, and consists of recognizing what the authors did and roughly how their technique works and why it's different. The second, much more nuanced level of understanding comes when you really dig into the paper and analyze every sentence, and commonly occurs when you need to extend or implement it. The writing is rarely wrong, but many things that are not relevant are either easier said than done or painful but boring implementation details. At that point, you could rewrite their paper from scratch if needed.

I have 2 comments saying just the opposite that good/bad papers require more time to read than bad/good papers.

So a bit of clarification to my comment. If I spend months reading papers about the same topic, the first papers will take me a lot of time but the last papers will take me less time because I have a lot of background and I don't have to check references, review concepts, understand maths proof or whatever. Probably those papers are very related and share a lot of information.

Good papers (for whatever you think it is good) require time to read because you really want to understand it completely. Bad papers (for whatever you think a bad paper is) require time to read because you cannot be sure if that paper is relevant for you unless you understand it completely. Although at the end you have a ton of papers to read and you check the abstract and decided whether spend time on the paper or not.

I'm slowly finishing up my PhD and I tend to agree with you. However, he will probably be reading quite a different selection of papers than what you encounter during a PhD.

In my experience, time required varies quite a lot between papers and authors. If you take a paper from, say, top 1% (or 0.1%) of papers published on some broad topic, you can probably read through it once and get some relatively good understanding of what the author was trying to say (and very likely enough to write a short re-cap).

This is definitely not true for the remaining 99% of the published scientific literature. At one point I had the idea of keeping up with my field of research by setting up Google Scholar alerts. This resulted in about 1 paper per 2-3 days that seemed to be worth studying based on the title and abstract. Still at that rate I found it quite impossible to keep up with all the content that dredged up.

I took classes in my PhD where we would read 4 papers a week, which is close to one a weekday. Some of the papers were very theory-heavy, when those came up you would spend half a day just reading.

Of course, for a seminar class, you do the strategic thing and read enough to not be caught flat-footed during seminar, and to come up with a few salient points of discussion.

I looked some at the papers read for this project and they seemed to be very systems-heavy. Having taken both theory-heavy and systems-heavy seminar classes, the systems-heavy seminar reading loads were much easier. You could probably read 5-8 systems papers a week, to comprehension, if you really wanted to.

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