This reminds me of how I did the background reading for my semantic code search paper ( http://www.jameskoppel.com/files/papers/yogo.pdf ). I made a list of somewhat related papers, printed out a big stack of them at a time, and then for each set a 7.5 minute timer for each. By the end of that 7.5 minutes, I should be able to write a few sentences about what exact problem it solves and what its big ideas are, as well as add more cited work / search keywords to expand my list of related papers. I’d often need to give myself a few extra minutes, but I nonetheless worked through it incredibly fast.
The big strategy is that papers are written in a certain format (e.g.: (1) Introduction (2) Overview (3) Detailed technical development (4) Implementation (5) Evaluation (6) Related work (7) Conclusion), so I knew exactly where to look to get the important bits.
A difference between this and your suggestions is that (1) I was already highly knowledgable in this area, having just supervised a master’s student building something better than these papers, and (2) the bar of “understand something well enough to discuss in a related work section” is rather low. Still, the end result is what is probably the best ever overview of semantic code search; our paper discusses a full 70 other tools.
This reminds me of how I did the background reading for my semantic code search paper ( http://www.jameskoppel.com/files/papers/yogo.pdf ). I made a list of somewhat related papers, printed out a big stack of them at a time, and then for each set a 7.5 minute timer for each. By the end of that 7.5 minutes, I should be able to write a few sentences about what exact problem it solves and what its big ideas are, as well as add more cited work / search keywords to expand my list of related papers. I’d often need to give myself a few extra minutes, but I nonetheless worked through it incredibly fast.
The big strategy is that papers are written in a certain format (e.g.: (1) Introduction (2) Overview (3) Detailed technical development (4) Implementation (5) Evaluation (6) Related work (7) Conclusion), so I knew exactly where to look to get the important bits.
A difference between this and your suggestions is that (1) I was already highly knowledgable in this area, having just supervised a master’s student building something better than these papers, and (2) the bar of “understand something well enough to discuss in a related work section” is rather low. Still, the end result is what is probably the best ever overview of semantic code search; our paper discusses a full 70 other tools.
I like this idea a lot. I often do pomodoros but there seems to be a lot of potential for other uses of timers while working.