怎样读文献（翻译）

学习前沿的技术，经常要读文献，但对很多人来说读文献是一件非常头疼的事。在网上偶然看到 Charles Sutton写的一篇文章，里面提到的读文献的方法感觉很不错，现把文章翻译了一下方便大家理解。原文链接：http://www.theexclusive.org/2017/11/read-a-paper.html . 文章后，附有原文内容。

我们可以读到很多关于如何读文献的建议，比如文章[1]中就提到了一些很好的方法。

这里，分享给大家一个很少被提及的小技巧，帮助大家更好的理解文献。这个小技巧就是在读完文献后问自己：

假设你有一个非常聪明的朋友，如果用5分钟把文献的内容讲给他，你将怎样总结？

直到你可以把一篇文献很好的解释给一个没读过此篇文献的很聪明的朋友，你才算读懂了这篇文献。你需要解释的很清晰，这个朋友才能明白这篇文献解决了什么问题，用了什么方法，和与其他文献的联系，比如在什么地方有了创新。

这个技巧里还包括了两条准则：

准则1：你需要用自己的话脱稿总结出文献的内容。如果只是重复文章内的话，说明你没有很好的理解文献内的信息。

准则2：你不能完全接纳文章表面上说的信息。你可以认为他们说的都是事实，但他们可能会夸大一点。你作为一个独立的学者，可能不完全同意他们的说法，或者他们提出作为解释观点的新证据。你在跟朋友解释的时候，也可以说说文献中可以改进的地方，和你认为他们文章呈现出的效果如何。

换句话说：如果你在描述过程中有模糊的地方，你这个很聪明的朋友可能会提出相应的疑问。所以直到我深入透彻的理解了论文中的结论和实验，我才会向我的朋友解释这篇文献。如果只是简单的说文献中作者提出的某个观点，但是这个观点本身又是不确定甚至可疑的，那朋友会立刻问到“为什么他们得出这样的结论？”“他们有实验证明这样的结论吗？”，面对这些提问，你需要有一个很好的回答。

在你阅读文献的过程中，也可以尝试这个技巧。比如读完引言，猜一下后面会用到的方法，然后继续阅读，验证自己的猜想。

简而言之，就是假设在你阅读文献的过程中，有一个很聪明的朋友。你可能不希望别人知道你有个假象的朋友，因为会影响声誉，但是这个方法对理解文献有帮助，所以为什么不试试呢？

[1] S. Keshav. How to read a paper. ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 37(3):83–84, 2007.

原文：

How to read a research paper

By Charles Sutton on November 4, 2017

There’s lots of advice you can read about how to read a research paper. There’s some good advice in this paper:

S. Keshav. How to read a paper. ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 37(3):83–84, 2007.

But there’s one tip that I can offer you to organise your reading of a paper that I can’t remember seeing elsewhere. Ask yourself:

What is the 5 minute summary that you would give to a Very Smart Friend?

I don’t understand a paper until I can explain the paper to a smart person who hasn’t read it. I need to be able to explain enough to the VSF so that she understands: what problem the paper is trying to solve, what sort of methods does it use, and how does it relate to the literature, i.e., what does it add.

But there’s two rules.

Rule 1: You have to use your own words, summarising the paper without looking at it. If you find yourself repeating sentences from the paper, the you haven’t internalised the paper’s message.

Rule 2: You cannot take anything the paper says at face value. You can assume that the authors won’t lie to you. But they might oversell a bit, and if you are a independent expert, you might not agree with everything they claim, or with how they interpret the new evidence that they have provided. Or you might be able to describe what’s going on a little bit better than they managed. What do you think that they have shown?

Another way of saying this: I know that my imaginary Very Smart Friend will jump on me if I say something inaccurate. So I don’t want to make a claim to my iVSF unless I can argue for it, based on what I have learned from the theory and experiments in the paper. If I just say something like “well, the authors claim X,” but X is controversial, or even dubious, then my iVSF will immediately want to know why they say that, do they really have evidence, and I had better have a answer.

It can also be good to try this exercise even before you are done. After reading the introduction, how well can you guess what the methods will be, even before you read them? Then read to see if you were right.

To sum up, I hope that I’ve convinced you that having an imaginary friend can help you in your research. You might not want to tell everyone on the internet that you have an imaginary friend, as I have just done, because it might not improve their respect for you. But hey, if it’s good for your research, then where are your priorities?