Instructions for Leading & Reading Papers

In this class we are reading five primary literature papers. These are papers written by active researchers in the field of Artificial Life which contain novel insights into artificial life topics and/or synthesis of perspectives on active research questions.

Reading primary literature is a bit different than reading a textbook or course notes. Often, discussing the paper and your confusions or questions about the paper is more informative than just the content being transmitted.

Below are some instructions for reading the papers and for being the paper leaders for each of our discussions.

Reading

Everyone reads papers differently, but here is a general outline for some effective ways to read a scientific paper.

You can and should take notes directly on Perusall; this will let other students see the same questions and thoughts you have, and enhance their understanding. I will also follow these steps on Perusall.

Steps for Readthroughs

Here’s the three-step process I follow to read a scientific paper. If it doesn’t work for you, that is okay; just make sure that when you are done reading you can answer these two questions:

  1. If I had to summarize the point of this paper in one sentence, what would I say?
  2. If I could ask the authors of the paper one question, what would it be?

Overview & Summary

First, read the paper’s abstract and its conclusion (if there is no marked conclusion, read the last two or three paragraphs). This gives you a sense of what the authors want you to get out of the paper. It’s okay if things don’t make sense yet.

High-Level Readthrough

Next, skim through the whole paper, front to end. Try to read the first and last sentence of each paragraph carefully, and the rest you can glance over and try to absorb.

Look carefully at the figures and find where they are referenced in the text. What are the figures conveying? Why did they choose these figures? Space in papers is usually limited and figures are highly space-expensive; what was so important that they wanted to show it to you visually?

Summarizing & Asking Questions

Finally, try to carefully look through any parts of the paper that did not make sense when you did your quick read-through and see if it didn’t make sense because you weren’t reading closely, or if it didn’t make sense because you have an additional question about the content. Err on the side of assuming you have an additional question. A good paper should be possible to read and understand when someone is skimming; this is how the majority of scientific papers are read and understood.

Then, see if you can summarize the paper’s main point in a single sentence. If you can’t, try going back to the overview and summary.

Leading

If you are leading a paper discussion, you should also follow the instructions for reading the paper.

You should also prepare the following for your discussion day:

  1. One high-level discussion question per person that you would like to dig into in more detail. You’ll discuss these in small groups (3 or 4 students) for 20 minutes, so they can be quite detailed and challenging, or vague and left open to interpretation. These should be questions that could be generic to any paper.
  2. Two specific questions, concerns, comments, or extensions that you would like to get other students’ ideas about. We will discuss these as a whole class, so they should be questions that you think the class might be able to reach a consensus on if we put our heads together. These should be questions that are specific to this paper.

Email these to me by the night before class so I can make adjustments if necessary.

Examples

Here’s some generic example discussion questions to get you on the right track and give some examples of the kinds of questions I’m thinking of.

High-Level Questions

  • What was the most interesting part of the paper to you? What did you really like and would like to know more about?
  • Do you think the paper was well-written and easy to understand? If so, what made it good? If not, how could it be improved?
  • What parts of the experiment/concept/idea they were discussing were challening to grasp? What parts felt like they ‘clicked’?
  • Do you feel like the authors adequately supported the conclusions they drew? Why or why not?
  • What’s something you would expand upon if you were tasked with coming up with a future experiment, discussion paper, or project based on this paper we just read?

Specific Questions

  • What was the point of the experiment where [author experiment]? What were they trying to show? Was there a different way they could have done it?
  • In Figure n, the authors say that x shows a correlation with y, but it doesn’t make sense to me how the figure actually shows that. What are they trying to say?
  • I didn’t really buy the argument that a causes b, because [your own reasoning here]. What did people think?