Reading Research Papers Critically
Examples of questions that you should keep in mind when reading the research papers:
- What problem does this paper solve, and what are the strengths and
limitations of its approach?
- Is the evaluation fair? Does it achieve it support the stated goals of the paper?
- Does the method described seem mature enough to use in real applications?
Why or why not? What applications seem particularly amenable to this approach?
- What good ideas does the problem formulation, the solution, the approach
or the research method contain that could be applied elsewhere?
- What would be good follow-on projects and why?
- Are the paper's underlying assumptions valid?
- Which important issues in the field does this paper illuminate
and how?
- Did the paper provide a clear enough and detailed enough
description of the proposed methods for you to be able to implement
them? If not, where is additional clarification or detail needed?
Avoid unsupported value judgments, like ``I liked...''
or ``I disagreed with...'' If you make judgments of this sort,
explain why you liked or disagreed with the point you describe.
Be sure to distinguish comments about the writing of the
paper from comment about the technical content of the work.