Jimme, a founder of Qiqqa.com wrote this in response to a question posted on HackerNews at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9245467

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Ask HN: How do you read Academic Papers?

53 points by milesf 6 hours ago | 28 comments

I have never really consciously taken the time to learn how to read academic papers, because it never occurred to me it’s something I needed.

I replied to a tweet today suggesting people ought to take a course how to read them, and got a great reply from Glenn Vanderberg on a starting point:

https://twitter.com/glv/status/579411305347489792

Does anyone else have any thoughts or opinions about this? I have a hard time learning things. Maybe this insight is part of the reason why.

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First a disclaimer: I am the founder of Qiqqa.com, which I wrote while doing my PhD at the University of Cambridge, and without which, I quite literally would have failed to complete my PhD.

I believe the key statement that has been iterated over and over here is that only 10% of scientific papers are ever worth reading.  And probably only 10% of the text of those 10% are worth reading.  They are they 1%.

This means that you end up with hundreds (if not thousands) of papers that you think you might have to read, but have no way of knowing whether or not you should until you have read them.  Chicken meet egg.

I built Qiqqa (and wrote a PhD) to solve this from two broad directions: using human intelligence and using artificial intelligence.

USING HUMAN INTELLIGENCE: While a load of people recommend printing out a paper to read it, I believe that that course leads to a lot of future pain.  Highlighting and annotating while you read is absolutely important. It allows you to skim through a paper and highlight only the important stuff.  Then you can come back later to properly read the important papers – only once you have skimmed enough papers to get a more general sense of the domain you are exploring.  If you have printed out papers, it is very difficult to quickly regroup and reread your annotated papers.  However, if you have highlighted your papers on your computer, laptop, tablet (or even phone while travelling from Cambridge to London), free products like Qiqqa (or www.pdfhighlights.com) offers you a simple annotation report to pull out all your annotations to not only remind you of what and where the important fact are, but also to let to jump straight to them to get reading immediately.

USING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: An interesting side effect of reading more scientific research is that the more you read, the more you have left to read.  Every paper you end up reading will make reference to another few papers that you probably should read; like The Magic Porridge Pot.  To solve the problem of ‘what should I read next’ (the working title of my  PhD), I built into Qiqqa the capability for it to ‘automatically read the papers for you’ using machine learning.  To this end, when reading a paper, Qiqqa can recommend to you the most relevant papers to read using something called Topical PageRank which calculates the relevance of a paper to what you are reading not only by its similarity to what you are reading, but also by how well received (cited) that paper is in your community.  Think of it as having your own personal Google where it biases results to satisfy your personal predilections.  You can read about how it works at http://aclanthology.info/papers/topical-pagerank-a-model-of-scientific-expertise-for-bibliographic-search.

Good luck with your research!