A Software Engineer's Guide to Reading Research Papers

Jumping in and trying to make sense of a recent research paper is unlikely to be productive unless you are already familiar with the field.

When reading the introduction, take note of the citations for earlier work and look them up. You may need to go back 10+ years of papers in order to progress with a recent paper.

The foundations to current best practices appeared in papers published 20-30 years ago. Often people waste considerable time and effort reinventing stuff that was documented 20+ years ago. I won't go into giving examples because that would require slaughtering herds of sacred cows and inviting a stampede of trolls.

Although you didn't say anything wrong, it sounds a little bit discouraging. In reality, it requires effort as it is the case with anything else and it is really not that hard. Case in point, I hardly knew anything about the ML field and LLMs but it took me not more than ~10 papers to get up to the speed.

Relevant: The classic How to Read a Paper by S.Keshav - https://svr-sk818-web.cl.cam.ac.uk/keshav/wiki/index.php/HTR...

Do you have any tips for writing research papers in a more accessible way?