Which papers to read?
Last update: Mar 10, 2015
Note: I am junior researcher. Ideas of this page are shallow, will improve by time.
Papers Source?
Papers Source?
- Sure only from top tier conferences and Journals. See.
- Any other source will have fatal problems...it will waste your time.
Why do researchers cite papers?
Why do researchers cite papers?
- It worth first to understand the reasons behind citations. In order of the frequency:
- Literature Review Citing
- You are solving the same problem I am tackling. [I may cite you]
- Your solution was an important literature jump. [I probably will cite you]
- You are solving the same problem I am tackling in a very related way. [I probably will cite you]
- Doing survey and need both above types.
- You are solving the same problem I am tackling. [I may cite you]
- I Use you
- I need algorithm of problem and you solved and provided it.
- You have nice dataset
- You provide some nice tool
- Your Good Results: I need to compare to you or refer to your old nice performance
- Inspiration: Your work inspired me to come up with an idea.
- Building block for most of people: Many people depend on it some how. E.g. SIFT work in vision.
- and some other reasons :)
Dependency Graph?
Dependency Graph?
- Imaging building graph, where nodes are papers
- Let edge A-B: Reading B really somehow helped A to formulate its solution.
- I think this graph will be sparse.
- That is many papers are nice one, but if we removed them from literature, we are all fine.
- E.g. Christophe 2008 ESS Algorithm is nice one. However, it is only cited as it is nice one. No one will depend on it in his work.
- Some work is not important in anyway.
- Some work is not practical. E.g. you need 10 minute to classify an image.
- And so on...many reasons why many papers are not that important. But we all like our work to be published :)
- That is many papers are nice one, but if we removed them from literature, we are all fine.
Depth and Breadth
Depth and Breadth
- One way to read a paper is through multiple iterations.
- In each iteration you gain more and more information.
- May be first iteration is 10 minutes. Realizing the problem, contribution, some results
- Second iteration go more in contribution details, little more in results
- Third iteration may be understand the heavy details
- May be now criticizing.
- And so on
- The more you go, the more depth you do.
- There are thousands of papers. We can't read all of them. We can't understand every one in depth.
- Normally, we have breadth in papers (1-2 simple iterations on many papers)
- We have depth in what we care with it more.
- The art is for each paper...to which depth to go?!
What do I need from literature?
What do I need from literature?
- Understand the different directions to solve a problem.
- We don't need to know paper in depth. We need breadth of papers.
- Just realize the different approaches
- We need to iterate on papers and cluster them.
- We need to mark the promising ones to go little depth
- Realize what are the state-of-the art work in the previous little years
- This is critical. You need to understand that and reasons behind it. These papers are read in depth.
- Building block papers
- Suppose the previous 2 steps will clearly point out to these papers.
- They may be recent. They may be old (E.g. Lecun 98 in CNN).
- Inspiration
- Many times, nothing inspire us. As it needs in-depth reading, thinking and criticizing.
- We usually depend on our imagination to find new solution.
Strategy
Strategy
- Don't over estimate the importance of reading literature papers
- Survey may tell you about the different directions to tackle a research problem.
- List the papers they refereed in each direction.
- Pick 1-2 papers with the highest citations and read them in depth.
- Later, iterate in a breadth style on other papers in each direction and see which are more promising. Add some depth for these ones.
- When you decide which direction to take in your research. Go more depth to literature in this direction.
- Through your research trip, keep reading in different directions...increase depth.
- Identify state-of-the-art work in recent years.
- In vision, we have some competitions. This is one way to know who is the best cross years.
- Generally, papers will refer to them.
- Read them in depth. You are competing with them.
- New conferences and Journals
- In each year, do your iteration and decide depth/breadth for the new directions / approaches.
- Within range of each ~5 years, new things are in the spot (e.g. Deep Learning in 2012). Who realize that early and orient his research toward it will lead in the research or be remarkable.
- Highly cited papers
- There will be some papers in each field with a great citation record. Everyone refer to them to some reason. It worth having some depth in them.