Paper reviews

[terriko]

One of the big problems of academia is that though we produce some amazing things, they're often not available, accessible, or even noticeable for the general public. That is, articles may cost money to read (unless you have access to academic journal subscriptions), interesting results get buried in dense scientific language, and often few people are talking about the results outside of academia (or sometimes even inside academia).

Last year, I committed myself to writing more book reviews to share what I read with others, and it occurs to me that this year, maybe I should make more of an effort to do the same with the scientific papers I read as well. The usual caveats apply: I've got my own set of biases in research just like I have taste in books, and it's entirely possible that I'll interpret results in ways other than they were intended.

This is something I did occasionally with my web security blog (and hoped to do more), but I'm currently reading papers about complex adaptive systems, biology, security, and more. So for now, these public paper reviews are going here right alongside my book reviews, and they'll be drawn not only from my own research interests but from the overlapping ones of my colleagues. I have a lead on a paper about railway design using slime molds, for example. You've been warned!

Comments

[zorkian]

Oh yeah. There's some interesting stuff in academia, but I don't have the patience or time to really go through stuff that dense. If I like the summary, sure, but I don't even know where to find good, relevant things like that!

[terriko]

My mother commented that they used to publish whole *books* of paper abstracts so you could figure out what papers would be worth reading. I wonder if those exist somewhere? I know IEEE has some sort of summary thing they send out now and again.

As far as finding stuff, I get a lot of my favourite papers via recommendations from other academics, and more from being out at conferences. Both of which aren't really viable avenues for discovery unless you're already in the community, sadly.