Ask HN: Where do you find interesting papers to read?
I'd like to start reading a couple of [academic] papers a week, but I'm not sure where to look for interesting ones. What are your sources?
For example, from UW:
Machine Learning: http://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse590m2/09au/ HCI: http://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse590h/13au/
I've found graduate reading seminars usually try to present a mix of seminal, eclectic and recent that gives you a diverse overview of the field.
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/spring13/cos598C...
And discovered interesting papers from conferences that I'd never otherwise look at.
From that start point - just 'crawl' for (a) interesting papers cited there, and (b) other things written by authors you found interesting, they'll often have the non-paywall versions of their papers available on their site.
Combine with a few less academic and more industry ones, like strange loop, ricon, etc. Make sure these are not too advertising-y.
HOWTO get started:
1. Pick a recent conference;
2. Click on the titles of any articles that look interesting;
3. When you get to the end of each article, dig through its bibliography. Many/most of the paper's references will also be available in the ACL Anthology; if not, Google Scholar will probably be a good resource for chasing them down. GOTO step 2.
Enjoy!
The most general is the Daily Roundup at National Affairs where you get titles and abstracts of papers fitting the daily theme (lousily). RSS available.
http://www.nationalaffairs.com/blog/blogger/findings-a-daily...
For arXiv there are blogs highlighting papers, like this one
http://www.technologyreview.com/contributor/emerging-technol...
For economics, be sure to subscribe to the RSS feeds of NBER and IZA. Note that those are not reviewed.
http://www.iza.org/en/webcontent/publications/papers
Availability varies. But you can usually find a prepub by just Googling.
tl;dr: arXiv. But I do mathematics, so YMMV.
1. Pick a field.
2. Look on Wikipedia, get a feel for history and seminal papers. Also
cross-reference any summary papers that you might see in ACM/Nature/Science.
3. Flip through a textbook on the topic and see if you can start grokking the
terms. The useful textbooks will probably name more fundamental research
that will serve as good reading.
4. Start digging back in sources. You'll start seeing familiar names pop up,
these are usually the seminal authors in the field, or people who write
really good summary papers.
If you google the topic, and all the papers you find reference "x et al"
in their abstract, you probably want to find that paper.
5. Read from back to front. Skip a little in the middle if pressed for time.
6. Now you can read papers on Nature/arXiv/Google and be well-prepared for the
terminology.
I think the above approach should work for any field, but the openness of the field will vary a lot. Physics and math typically have large collections of PDFs online, but I'm not sure how good CS or bioengineering is in that regard.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchrotron
[2] http://ab-abp-rlc.web.cern.ch/ab-abp-rlc/AP-literature/Coura...
[3] http://www.fieldp.com/cpa.html
[4] http://slac.stanford.edu/pubs/slacreports/reports02/slac-r-1...
edit: formatting
Anyway, what topic are you interested in?
Usenix conference proceedings.
There are journals that priced themselves into irrelevance (Software Practice and Experience, I'm looking at you).
I try to read a couple papers a week, usually augmenting with Wikipedia tours to cover subjects I'm weak in.
But the very next I have personally found is ssrn.com - which is an open source repository.
You will also find that more and more papers are being hosted on arXiv.org.
If I am reading a book that links to specific academic papers, I'll first try google scholar, then a google search for the primary author. If the first doesn't return a link to a free copy, you will usually find it on the authors .edu homepage.
Also, for computational chemistry, at least, there's the Computational Chemistry Highlights blog [ http://www.compchemhighlights.org/ ], which selects (what they think are) interesting papers published within the past two years or so.
Finally, I follow scientiests' blogs and social media, who will typically share excellent papers that they find. Email lists like the Computational Chemistry List [ ccl.net ] will usually discuss papers as they relate to the conversations at hand.
Unfortunately, many of the excellent chemistry journals are behind pay walls.
This is how I harvest info for chemistry. I think it's highly probably that this same method could be used for all scholarly disciplines.
Best of luck.
http://www.helioviewer.org -and- http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/?type=current
If you want to stay up to speed on the latest and greatest across a wide range of topics, Science and Nature are often worth a read; those are weekly.
And then once you have favorite authors, you can set up automated searches to alert you whenever they publish something.
Having a peek at a listing of the talks being presented at conferences usually gives you a sneak preview of what's going to be published "soon" since people often give talks on a subject before they publish a paper on it. Conferences are also broken into subject areas, again helping you find what's of interest to you.
Nearly all CS papers are posted by the authors on personal pages in PDF form. Once you've found something that has an interested abstract just go back to regular Google with the title, add "pdf" and it's almost certain you'll get a link to the file.
[edit]: Also, once you've got one paper that fits squarely into an area of interest you can then just start reading references. You'll also get a better handle on terminology which should make your Google Scholar searches more effective.
For me, where is not the question, when is.
My Evernote is full of 'read-later' bookmarks, which I wish I will read one day...
* For ~300$/year, I receive by mail many journals and
transactions from ACM.
* For ~40$/year, I have access to some of IEEE Xplore.
Now I'm an undergrad and I don't understand 50% of what's written in those. There's the 50% I can understand which gives me new ideas, new tools or better understanding. For the 50% I don't grok, I know planting the seeds in my brain will eventually lead to analogies and eventual understanding. Surely it can't be bad to read more than less.
I made a Perl script that emails you daily pubmed papers based on a list of interests, might be of use: https://github.com/bsima/daily-scholar
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abstract_service.html
You can search for papers any which way: by author name, by journal, by year, or some combination. Links to the papers themselves are all on ADS. Older papers are available for free on the journals' websites, and more recent papers are available for free on arxiv.org.
When looking for good papers to start with, you can just search for all papers written in a particular range of years and sort the results by the number of times the paper has been cited. (Usually the citation count is a good estimator of the importance of the paper.) If you search for all papers written within a range of years, though, make sure to select the sort by citation count option before doing your search. (Otherwise ADS will only sort the top 200 results that it returns, which will just be the 200 authors whose names come first alphabetically.) If you're more interested in physics than astronomy, there's also an option to include physics papers in your search.
I would recommend browsing through the most highly cited papers of the past decade or two. When you find one that interests you, ADS will also give you links to all the papers that it cites, and all the papers that have cited it. You can then sort those results by citation count to find another important, related paper. After doing this for a while you start to read through a network of papers in a particular field and get a grasp of how the field has developed and what the current state of the field is.
Another good resource to find papers is review articles. The most important journal for review articles in astronomy is Annual Reviews of Astronomy & Astrophysics (ARA&A). Browse through their recent volumes for an article that interests you, then skim the article. It will give you an idea of the state of the field and will summarize all the recent, important papers in that field. (If it's a good review article, anyway....) Some other review journals that I've used include Reviews of Modern Physics, Living Reviews in Relativity, and Space Science Reviews. (As a note, there are review journals in every field, so this technique works in disciplines other than astronomy. In fact, ARA&A is published by a group which publishes review journals in many disciplines, so you can find many other review journals on their site. I can't speak to the quality of those journals, though.)
An interesting journal that I like to look through every now and again, too, is the American Journal of Physics. It's not meant to publish new physics, per se, but is more oriented towards developing a better understanding of "solved physics." So, for example, in the current issue, there is a paper on explaining how magnetic traps work and another paper which provides a new proof of Bell's inequality. Nothing truly new there, but it can help you gain a deeper understanding of physics, and oftentimes you don't need much background in physics or math to understand the papers.
http://complexpapers.tumblr.com
of recent papers in complex systems and networks.
https://twitter.com/PacBio is also an interesting follow, although it's limited to stuff about their tech
Imho, you should spend half a day or so going through 20-50 papers, reading abstracts+intros+conclusions to figure out which are the most interesting and select the 2 candidates. Especially at the beginning, focus on good/known authors.
BTW, surveys are also quite interesting papers by themselves.
Please feel free to submit a PR with more if you have!
1) Search on Google Scholar(using boolean operators)
2) Find interesting articles and read them
3) Check the references that are used in these articles. These articles might be interesting as well.
ps: We are building a tool to write academic papers: beta.bohrresearch.com
Not necessarily peer-reviewed, but most of the papers will be or have been published in a conference or journal.
PRs welcome.
* Microsoft Research
* Yahoo Research
* Google Scholar
As of now, CS centric. Great discovery + recommendations: