Abstract
A novice researcher can believe that the doing of research is primarily about investigation—running experiments, developing theory, or doing analysis. With experience, though, researchers discover the importance of developing an understanding. It has been argued that many experimental researchers do their best work after they have been in a field for five years or more, because it takes time to acquire a deep, thorough appreciation of the area, and of existing knowledge and its limitations. To acquire this understanding, you need to become an effective reader of research papers.
You know, we have little bits of understanding, glimpses, a little bit of light here and there, but there’s a tremendous amount of darkness.
Noam Chomsky
And diff’ring judgements serve but to declare, That truth lies somewhere, if we knew but where.
William Cowper
Hope
The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.
Dr. Seuss
I Can Read With My Eyes Shut!
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Notes
- 1.
I’ve used “referee” rather than “reviewer” in this book (but “reviewing” rather than the slightly awkward “refereeing”), but in my experience the terms are used to mean much the same thing. Here, though, I am also using “referee” to mean “examiner”, because thesis examination involves many of the same skills as paper reviewing, and an understanding of the reviewing process will help you prepare your thesis.
- 2.
As I have noted elsewhere in this book, the practice of revising a conference paper to create a journal submission was once common, but, for refereed conference papers that are available online from a major publisher, is now infrequent—and is increasingly discouraged. However, where multiple versions exist, they need to be cited correctly.
- 3.
If you are new to research, you may want to skip the rest of this chapter—but do return to it before you submit work for reviewing or examination.
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© 2014 Springer-Verlag London
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Zobel, J. (2014). Reading and Reviewing. In: Writing for Computer Science. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-6639-9_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-6639-9_3
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