Engineers: Reading Publications?

[was1984]

I'm an aural and tactile learner, so the method of reading to learn things is kind of difficult for me. Does anyone else have a lot of trouble reading articles and conference papers and actually getting anything out of them? So many of these papers are either really poorly written, way over my head, or both. Has anyone figured out ways to get more out of these ubiquitous documents?

[liszt85]

I'm an aural and tactile learner, so the method of reading to learn things is kind of difficult for me. Does anyone else have a lot of trouble reading articles and conference papers and actually getting anything out of them? So many of these papers are either really poorly written, way over my head, or both. Has anyone figured out ways to get more out of these ubiquitous documents?

Do more journal clubs..so that you actually discuss what's in the paper. So if you haven't understood a lot of it, you will get a very good gist of it when people discuss it with you. You could also explain your difficulty to a small group of people you're comfortable with and form a journal club with them (as its beneficial to everybody to attend journal clubs).

[zilch]

Focus on the figures. Most good engineering publications are written in the following manner.

1. take experimental/theoretical results and make some sort of statement

2. make a few figures that illustrate the key points of your results/statement (and how it improves or differs from previous work if needed)

3. Write the meat of the paper around the figures. Adding in whatever equations that were used.

4. Toss in abstract, introduction and conclusion and if applicable a section on experimental methodology.

When reading a paper, I tend to skim the abstract and introduction to make sure that I know exactly what they're trying to say with that particular paper. Then I turn my attention to the figures and data presented, the majority of the text I treat as a reference that explains what's going on in the figures and I refer to it when I want an explanation about a particular trend or result. This way, I pick up the information in the order that makes sense to me rather than the order it was presented.

[was1984]

Great ideas, thanks guys!