Mastering Academic Reading Skills

Reading Academically By: Dr. Abeer Khaldoon

Reading as a Skill You need to read critically is what I am reading true? is it interesting? is it useful? You need to read effectively extract the important information don t waste time on irrelevant papersJPEG is a lossy image compression method. It employs a transform coding method using the DCT (Discrete Cosine Transform).

Picking Appropriate Material To do good research, you should read academic articles and advanced technical papers (which we call the literature ) to demonstrate you have deep knowledge For studying a topic , you may be expected to read textbooks to make sure you understanding of the basics In a new area, start with tutorials, textbooks (if there are any) and review papers before you move on to the literature

Active Reading Understand the difference between surface reading deep reading Memorisation understanding Vary your style of reading depending on the current task reading to select suitable papers to understand

Effective Reading In order to select a paper you should read the abstract, summary and/or conclusion if they seem interesting, skim through the rest understand key diagrams and/or equations if this is a key paper, read it again, properly Measure and increase your reading speed should be at least 200 words per minute

Critical Reading In order to understand a paper you should put the work in context identify the key message assess the supporting evidence assess the arguments and assumptions assess the impact

Class room Exercise Read a brief extract Make two itemised lists 1.of what problems the author is claiming to tackle 2. and what solutions he proposes

Exercise: [E.F Codd, A Relational Model for Large Shared Data Banks, Comm. ACM, 1970] Future users of large data banks must be protected from having to know how the data is organized in the machine (the internal representation). A prompting service which supplies such information is not a satisfactory solution. Activities of users at terminals and most application programs should remain unaffected when the internal representation of data is changed and even when some aspects of the external representation are changed. Changes in data representation will often be needed as a result of changes in query, update, and report traffic and natural growth in the types of stored information. Existing noninferential, formatted data systems provide users with tree-structured files or slightly more general network models of the data. In Section 1, inadequacies of these models are discussed. A model based on n-ary relations, a normal form for data base relations, and the concept of a universal data sublanguage are introduced. In Section 2, certain operations on relations (other than logical inference) are discussed and applied to the problems of redundancy and consistency in the user's model.

The exercise is meant to make you work into the task of extracting meaningful information from your reading must, is not a satisfactory solution, should, needed, ... .....must be protected from having to know.... Existing ... data systems .... inadequacies of these models are discussed A model ....., and the concept of .... are introduced.

Further remarks ... on context and contribution What is the motivation? - -- unsolved problem, wrong viewpoint/paradigm, existing contradictions/ limitations What is the contribution? - -- method, tool, proof, formalism, system, algorithm, evidence Conclusions? - -- what properties can be learnt? generalised?

Class room Exercise Future users of large data banks must be protected from having to know how the data is organized in the machine (the internal representation). A prompting service which supplies such information is not a satisfactory solution. Activities of users at terminals and most application programs should remain unaffected when the internal representation of data is changed and even when some aspects of the external representation are changed. Changes in data representation will often be needed as a result of changes in query, update, and report traffic and natural growth in the types of stored information. Existing noninferential, formatted data systems provide users with tree-structured files or slightly more general network models of the data. In Section 1, inadequacies of these models are discussed. A model based on n-ary relations, a normal form for data base relations, and the concept of a universal data sublanguage are introduced.

Assessing the Impact A key paper is one which has solved an outstanding problem changed the way we think about a subject changed the way we teach the subject changed industrial practice allowed us to solve new problems been cited by many other researchers You should evaluate your chosen paper(s) against these criteria (and others)

What should you do now? Start looking through lots of papers on topics that are relevant for your research Find papers that report results of primary research Examine verbs used in the abstract, skim through introduction and conclusion/ discussion sections Narrow down the range of topics you wish to write about