Good advice. I ran an academic lab for a long time, read and reviewed a lot of papers, and trained students to read them. My process is as follows.
In order, and quickly, I look at the abstract, the picture at the top of page 2 (unless it was on page 1 like vision and graphics papers tend to do), the references, the conclusion, the lit review, if I’m still interested I try to scan the whole thing to decide what the main point of the paper is. Then if I care to, I start again and read it linearly start to finish.
If I’d agreed to review a paper, I don’t get to abort the process. Otherwise I can bail at any step.
It's sad that papers in this area are so standardized in format though. Some of the classic papers break every convention and are written in very idiosyncratic ways. I want to read papers that can be enjoyed slowly and that change my life, not papers where I get trained to read them quickly in a certain way and that have prescribed sections and predictable figures. Life is too short for this rote work.
Agreed, idiosyncratic voice is so life- and mind- affirming in papers. (Do you mind sharing examples of three papers that you did enjoy slowly and change your conceptual life?)
Nice! Yeah that workflow feels pretty relatable. My other rule of thumb is if it's an architecture paper (system or neural net) without a diagram, I immediately bail haha
In order, and quickly, I look at the abstract, the picture at the top of page 2 (unless it was on page 1 like vision and graphics papers tend to do), the references, the conclusion, the lit review, if I’m still interested I try to scan the whole thing to decide what the main point of the paper is. Then if I care to, I start again and read it linearly start to finish.
If I’d agreed to review a paper, I don’t get to abort the process. Otherwise I can bail at any step.