If you are interested in doing a seminar, BTP, MTP etc. with me, here are some baseline expectations I have of  research students:



How to read a research paper

It is important that you learn to read research papers critically, so here are some questions to ask yourself as you read and some tips on reading.

Tips on reading research papers
You need not read a research paper sequentially from beginning to end. Here’s one
possible sequence:
– Read the title. (What is the paper about?)
– Read the abstract. (Should give you a concise overview of the paper.)
– Read the introduction. (Look for motivations, relation to other work, and a more detailed overview.)
– Look at the structure of the paper. (What do the remaining sections address. How do they fit together?)
– (Read the previous/related work section. (How does this work relate? What is new or different about this work?))
– Read the conclusions. (What were their results?)
– Read the body of the paper. You may want to skip over all the equations the first time through.


The references won’t mean much to you if you’re not familiar with the area. Sometimes important parts of the work may be contained in the references, particularly in
conference papers since space is limited. The references are very important when you are researching a topic—they point you to related research as well as the research upon which the current paper builds upon. Sooner or later, you will come across something that you don’t understand. What can you do? You should try to figure out what it is and how it is being used (even though you still don’t understand it). For further reading, see the references!

How to write a reading report
Your reading report should be at most one page, and I’d prefer they be single spaced. It should have two main components:
  1. A concise summary of the paper, providing an overview of what they actually did (and why), what methods they used, and what their results were.
  2. A brief critique of the paper, giving a technical evaluation of the work, what things were unclear or not addressed, and the merits of the work. This should be a technical critique, not an emotional critique!
These two components can (and sometimes should) be intertwined. Here are some guidelines for writing reading reports:

Here is a list of points you should bring out in a reading report: