Paper review
A paper review is a short essay (3-4) single space 4pages reporting what you have learned from reading a research paper. Writing reviews for the papers you have read is a great way to sharpen your paper reading skills such a review is typically structured in three sections:
- Summary
Give a brief summary of the work in your own words. This section demonstrates your understanding of the paper, and as such it should answer the following question:
- What is the research problem the paper attempts to address?
- What are the claimed contributions of the paper?
- How do the authors substantiate their claims?
- What are the conclusions?
- It is imperative that you use your own word to summarize the paper .another way to think of it is that you are writing an alternative, elaborate abstract for the paper.
- Evaluation
Evaluate the work by answering the following question:
- Is the research problem significant?
- Are the contributions significant?
- Are the claims valid?
Learn to be fair: point out the strengths and weaknesses of the work. if you are reading that has been published for a while , make sure you are reading the paper in the right historical context : what seems to be obvious now might have been ground- breaking then.
- Synthesis:
Generate any interesting thoughts you have on the work by consulting the following questions:
- What is the crux of the research problem?
- What are some alternative approaches to address the research problem?
- What is a better way to substantiate the claim of the authors?
- What is a good argument against the case made by the authors?
- How can the research results be improved?
- Can the research results be applied to another context?
- What are the open problems raised by this work?
- Bottom-line can we do better than the authors?
