How to Read Technical Papers
How to Read Technical Papers: the 5-Z Method
This document is a list of guidelines inspired by Rob Weir's Methods for reviewing papers. Here we focus on reading, summarizing, and understanding technical papers.
The goal of the exercise of reading an article is to gather information and extract one or several messages. These messages may become new rulers by which you are going to measure future discoveries.
The five steps below (the first four corresponding to Weir's 4-Z method) should help you get to the core of the paper and extract the marrow:
- summarize
- analyze
- criticize
- synthesize
- summarize again!
We explore each one separately.
- Summarize
- Go from the ground up. Write a half page summary of the paper. Do not stick to the details, unless they are important. What are the results?
- Analyze
- Is the article in question interesting, important, or useful? When was it written? Where was it written? Which publication does it appear in? These are clues that help understand the importance, if any, of the article. Are the results presented going to influence the field dramatically? Some? Is it just theoretical?
- Criticize
- If the paper presents results, how were the results obtained? The measurements done? Is there a comparison of the system presented to other systems? Is the comparison fair? Is it multi-dimensional (comparing the system to other systems and to itself under different conditions)? Is the work original? Just something that was part of the body of knowledge, but with a different twist?
- Synthesize
- How does the information presented in the paper fit in the context of the discipline? Does the paper offer a bridge to future development? Does it offer a new point of view on something we already new?
- Summarize Again!
- Once you have gone through the 4 steps above, take the information you gathered in the previous 3 steps (Analyze, Criticize, and Synthesize), and summarize your half-page to a paragraph. You'll have to leave a lot of stuff out, but keep the results, the contribution, what is important. Finally when you are done with the paragraph, try to figure out how you could tell a friend who's passing you in the hallway what this paper is all about. You just have a few seconds. What's it all about?
That's the one-sentence summary.
