Reading Academic Papers

I’ve been continuing to verify participant data with team and help organize volunteer participants. One interesting thing I’ve noticed about this process is that members of the team tend to be more susceptible to noticing different facial features than each other. ie. I tend to pick up distinctions in the eyes and noise, whereas other team member might recognize those differences in head-shape or the ears.

Additionally I have been reviewing the literature for Keyword Detection in audio. Reading academic papers is definitely a process that I hadn’t had much experience with prior to this research, and it’s something were I feel like I am still very much learning how to do so such that I can do so in both a way where I learn about the current understanding of the field/topic but also in a way that is efficient in terms of absorbing content. I tend to start with the abstract, introduction, and conclusion first, and then work my way through the methods and results. One of the difficulties I’ve found is that because I’m still new to these topics and idea a lot of the names for methods are unfamiliar to me and I find myself spending a great deal of time reading background of those terms to build a place to put the findings of the paper. This is not a problem on it’s own, but I find that I struggle with determining which of the terms are truly ones the paper hinges on and which are tangential. One of the strategies I’ve adopted is to for each thing I read mark down everything I want to review and then essential recursively preform a breath first search so that I don’t end up 20 papers down a path that isn’t particular relevant to the subject matter as often.