how to read a research paper
To read a research paper, it is suggested that you read the paper in three stages. In the first stage, focus on the paper title, sections such as abstract, introduction, and conclusion. Go through the names of all the sections that are present in the paper. This pass helps you to get a gist of what the paper is about, domain, and novel contributions. You can then decide based on your reading if you want to re-read the paper further in detail, or keep it aside based on your requirements.
In the second pass, go through all the sections, read the plots, illustrations, and tables to get a better idea of what is happening. You can ignore the proof at this stage. The main aim at the end of the second pass is that you are able to summarize the paper, understand the key ideas, and explain the paper to others.
In the third pass, we try to virtually implement the paper. If certain details are not present in the paper, try to have your own set of assumptions which can help you be as specific as possible. We aim to challenge the assumptions made by the author through the implementation, focusing on the details, and try to replicate the results to come to the same conclusions which the authors made. At the end, you should be able to reconstruct the structure of the paper from your own memory, and identify its strong and weak points.
For literature review, first search the keywords from Google Scholar and download the papers by citation/date. On the related work sections of these papers, find common papers in literature review. Aim to find a survey paper which contains a comprehensive understanding of the topic. If you find the common papers, check the authors of common papers and the journals/conferences they publish in by visiting their website. Visit the conference/journal website and download the papers related to the topics. The papers downloaded from the website and initial batch of common papers compose our first set of papers which we will use for literature review.
Reference: https://web.stanford.edu/class/ee384m/Handouts/HowtoReadPaper.pdf