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Guildlines For Reading A Research Paper

Identify the keys ideas of the paper.

• What is the key hypothesis or hypotheses?
• What are the approaches, experiments to test these hypotheses?
• How are the conclusions reached? How are alternative explanations are ruled out?

Background and significance

• Survey the background. How did the authors come up with their ideas and hypotheses? (Identifying the right questions is the key in science, as is often true in other situations.)
• Significance. How will this work advance the field? (Only importants things can motivate and engage people to work on them.)

Critiques

• What are the main problems, flaws, caveates in the paper?
• How can we design better studies, more rigorous reasoning and analysis to improve this paper?
• How to improve the presentation of the paper? Better summary diagram, better illustrations, reorganization of the sectionss, etc?