Many of the readings for this course are papers from the research literature. These papers can be intimidating if you haven’t encountered them before. This page contains some suggestions on how to read a research paper, along with links to useful external resources.

What is a research paper?

In computer science, original research is typically published at peer-reviewed conferences. Typically these papers have between two and ten authors, and the paper typically reports on about a person-year’s worth of work (though this can vary widely). The authors will be a mix of junior and senior researchers: anyone who contributed something “intellectually significant” to the paper is typically listed as an author. In most CS sub-disciplines (including software engineering, which is the source for most of the optional readings), author order is indicative: the first author is usually the person who did most of the technical work (e.g., implementing the tool, running the experiments, etc.), and the last author is typically the project leader (often, but not always, the first author’s research advisor). Often, but not always, the first author is a PhD student.

To be accepted at a peer-reviewed conference, a research paper must be novel: that is, it must contain some new knowledge or evidence that the research community wasn’t aware of before. This requirement impacts how they are written: a research paper must focus on the specific thing that is novel about it, rather than surveying the field as a whole (though you can find “survey” papers that give an overview of a research area, and if you need to know the current state of a sub-field, looking for a survey paper is the way to go).

External Resources

I highly recommend Keshav’s How to Read a Paper if you’re not sure where to start. This short (3-page) article gives a specific strategy for attacking a research paper.

I recommend Griswold’s How to Read an Engineering Research Paper. This short article is more aimed at PhD students. but it helps to explain how a research paper is structured (and might be useful to you to help understand the anatomy of a research paper).