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refereed is an indicator that it is of value, it is not a guarantee. Many people undertake
work that did not deserve to be written; sometimes it gets published.
Indeed, few papers are perfect. They are a presentation of new work rather than
a considered explanation of well-known results, and the constraints of writing to a
deadline mean that mistakes are undiscovered and some issues unexplored. Some
aspects of older papers may be superseded or irrelevant, or may rely on limited or
technically outdated assumptions. A paper can be seen as a snapshot of a research
program at a moment in time—what the researchers knew when they submitted. For
all these reasons, a reader needs to be questioning, balanced, and skeptical. In short,
don't accept something as true just because it was published. But that does not justify
researchers being dismissive of past work; rather, they should respect it and learn
from it, because their own work is likely to have similar strengths and weaknesses.
Some inexperienced researchers see other work as either perfect or poor, with nothing
in-between. Usually, neither of these extremes is correct.
While many papers may be flawed, they define scientific knowledge. (In contrast,
textbooks are usually consolidations of older, established work that is no longer at
the frontier.) If many researchers trust a particular paper, it is still reasonable to be
skeptical of its results, but this needs to be balanced against the fact that, if skepticism
is justified, these other researchers are all mistaken.
Read papers by asking critical questions of them, such as:
￿
Is there a contribution? Is it significant?
￿
Is the contribution of interest?
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Are the results correct?
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Is the appropriate literature discussed?
￿
Does the methodology actually answer the initial question?
￿
Are the proposals and results critically analyzed?
￿
Are appropriate conclusions drawn from the results, or are there other possible
interpretations?
￿
Are all the technical details correct? Are they sensible?
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Could the results be verified?
￿
Are there any serious ambiguities or inconsistencies?
That is, actively attempt to identify the contributions and shortcomings rather than
simply reading from one end to the other. This analysis of a paper can be thought of
as verifying that each component is robust. If the paper is important to your work,
you should analyze it until you have formed a reasoned opinion about each of its
components; and if some components are questionable, this should be reflected in
your literature review.
Write down your analysis of the paper—you will read hundreds of papers, and
in some cases will not formally describe them until months or years later. However,
detailed analysis can be difficult before you have undertaken your own work, and
in so doing developed a mature perspective. Thus reviewing of literature should not
stop when the investigation begins, but continue alongside the research.
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