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Comment by seanwilson | Hacker News Reader

Academic papers can seem incredibly intimidating but you have to remember: they're not written to be readable to the casual reader unlike articles on the web.

Journals have strict page limits so there's no space to introduce domain specific terminology or give a brief tutorial on the topic. They only have enough room to tersely describe directly relevant background material and will assume you are knowledgable in the domain.

Read the abstract then the conclusion. If it sounds like you want to understand the rest of the paper after that, be prepared to look up terminology, read citations, follow tutorials and reread the paper multiple times to really understand it. Don't be put off if you can barely understand it the first time.

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Reading the abstract and the conclusion is the most important part of reading and selecting academic papers. Especially in the beginning.

If you read the abstract and the conclusion you should have a good sense of what this paper is about, what it is trying to prove, and perhaps also a sense of how they prove this. These are the primary factors for you to see if this paper is worthwhile to you.

Agreed.

I read the abstract, if it seems relevant, then I flip to the conclusion, if it still seems relevant then I skim read it through, then print it out if it looks like something I need to dig deeper into.

Often those lightbulb moments have only come for me after printing it out, despite reading it 4-5 times on readcube.

> They only have enough room to tersely describe directly relevant background material and will assume you are knowledgable in the domain.

I feel like it just is the dominant style; it doesn't have to be that way. Sometimes there are these gems, that are extraordinarily well written and bring new ideas in a gentle way. Some examples:

- Zhang, Cha, John C. Platt, and Paul A. Viola. "Multiple instance boosting for object detection." Advances in neural information processing systems. 2005.

- Gelman, Andrew, et al. Bayesian data analysis. Vol. 2. Chapman & Hall/CRC, 2014.

So, IMHO it can be done, but it is a talent.

>"Journals have strict page limits so there's no space to introduce domain specific terminology or give a brief tutorial on the topic."

This is a big problem, especially in the digital world we live in now. There should be no page-limits to publish a paper. Of course, I understand that you can't expect to have each paper introduce and re-explain every single word/topic/definition for a layman to get up to scratch, but there has to be a better middle ground than what we have now.

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