7 John McCarthy Papers in 7 Weeks

Most of the reasons and benefits apply to other papers of course, not just those authored by McCarthy.

I used to collect PDFs of CS papers to read, and try to read them while sitting at my laptop, but I never actually finished reading a single one of them. I would start them, get slightly distracted or bored, and switch away to something else, whether HN, or programming, or almost anything else on the computer.

If you have similar tendencies, and you're going to try reading some papers, may I suggest an approach which may be obvious to some but was not to me, that I recently adopted to great success: print them out and read them away from the computer.

For me, this was a bit counter to how I normally work. I usually loathe having hard copies of anything that I'm not legally required to. I would much rather have a PDF somewhere on a hard drive than keep documents in folders and filing cabinets. I expect many HN readers are similar.

However, I've found that printing out papers and reading them somewhere away from the computer is just so much more productive. For me, it's really almost infinitely so, since I never finished a single paper while reading the PDF in Preview.app but have finished many in the past couple of months that I printed out. Somehow, sitting somewhere with a hard copy both allows me more focus, and gives me more pleasure. With a PDF, it's often a bit hard to gauge how much there is left to read, while if you have a stack of paper in a binder clip, it's obvious in a tactile way. I bet it's also better for my eyes, or at least it feels that way.

This is not a new or innovative strategy, but I thought I'd share my experience since it might not be the first choice for many programmers.

One other tip is to avoid printing papers out of at home, if you don't have a fast laser printer but instead some sluggish old inkjet as I do. Print them out at a print shop, which is faster and likely even cheaper (Fedex/kinkos in NYC charges 12c/page B&W.

If you are interested in reading papers then you might want to follow http://twitter.com/onepaperperday

You might also want to use a tool like Mendelay. It works on Ubuntu too and lets you store papers online and sync. Plus a whole lot of features.

I am interested in reading papers to improve my knowledge and have already started hoarding papers. It requires some discipline though especially if you are not used to reading technical papers. I wonder if there is scope for a Google Group to read and discuss a paper every week or month or twice a month. :)

I've already selected mine. "Generality in Artificial Intelligence" Just in the first couple pages I came across an idea that ties into the plot of a SF book I read a year or so ago. (no spoiler here, you'll have to wait to know the title)

I've been trying for months to get in the habit of reading an academic article every week (and then writing a summary on my blog).

The biggest hindrance has been simply time. I need something like 6 hours to get through a paper that pushes my boundaries properly. Especially if I want to understand it well enough to write a summary.

Needless to say, my Mendeley is now full of papers I will likely never get to.