How To Read A Paper Quickly & Effectively With AI

one of the biggest academic misconceptions is that you need to read a research paper from the beginning AKA from the title and the abstract to the end the conclusion and the references and that is absolutely not the case yes sometimes you may need to read into the depth and you need to read into the method and justification and the conclusion and the results yes sometimes that is appropriate but sometimes it is not sometimes you just need to skim the paper and that is also okay and that there is a way that you're able to do

that and get the information that you want efficiently in today's video I'm going to be going through the traditional method of reading using pen and paper reading a paper skimming it in a way that allows you to read as quickly and as efficiently as possible taking out the information that you most need and I'm then going to go through an AI platform that allows you to ask it questions based off of that research paper really cool so you can ask direct questions about that paper that allows you to understand it further the first thing you

want to look at are the keywords within the title so just to quickly get a brief overview as to what this title is about they're looking at tkis they're looking at contractile force in rats and it's an engineered heart tissue okay so quick overview as to what that looks like the next thing you want to go to is look at the abstract so every abstract is laid out slightly differently but in this case you can clearly see the introduction the method and then the conclusion so what you want to do here is just give yourself

a little look and you know briefly look through it understand what the background is they're seeing what the Gap in literature is they're looking at the mode of toxicity and trying to understand that and then just quickly looking at the results to understand engage what's happening here that's about as far as you need to know then you're moving on to the introduction in the introduction I typically tend to stop at the first paragraph so that's just this first paragraph here to understand the background of this particular topic if I don't know it already and then

I want to move on to the last paragraph of the introduction so that's this one here because what you'll find in this last paragraph is people um usually what they'll list here are points about any limitations what they're doing in this study uh here you're saying in this study we analyzed it and it just gives a bit of information that you might need to know I then move on to the I skip the methods and materials and this remember this is for skimming so this is not to fully understand this is just for skimming I

skipped to the results now in the results there are different ways again that papers might show you some results but you want to kind of scroll through to understand the figures for the most part and if they do use subheadings to understand any subheadings so in this case they haven't used subheadings and they just have figures so what I'll tend to do is look at each figure and try to kind of like understand what they are again I'll kind of focus on the first sort of sentences and the last sentences of each paragraph So as

you can see in the last sentence here they say this could index indicate that this drug is inhibiting so that's already told me what the result is I don't really need to spend time reading this whole paragraph here I then will go through and take a look at the diagrams and take a look at kind of the figures they've given me and you can kind of try to find and look at some patterns that stand out to you and try to understand what those might mean you then will skip through all the results and you

land at the conclusion so I'm skipping through the results here and I'm landing at the conclusion so this conclusion isn't it's kind of all mixed up it's mixed up with them is the methods the results but here's the conclusion now this is a really nice kind of conclusion it summarizes what it is that's being shown at this point you understand what this the summary is of this paper you don't really need to go any further but one thing that you could look out for which is quite helpful is to understand what the limitations of this

paper is so as you can see here it says limitation of the study and there is a little paragraph that gives you that detail here if you can't find it by just giving a quick skim do Ctrl F and search for the word limitation then you'll probably find somewhere that they've mentioned it maybe within the methods or maybe within the results and this is really helpful again with your writing or you're using this for a literature review you are going to know you are going to want to know what the limitations are so that's really

important as well lastly again this is you know for your quick skin you want to go to your references and just take a quick look at the references and pull out any references that you think could be useful so when I was reading I noticed that reference number four gave me a good background on the topic and they were saying that these the methods they used were taken from this paper so I think this would be a good paper to take a look at for further reading um again I think I'm number 25 is a

really good paper as they mentioned it in one of the results saying that they've kind of uh found similar results here so I'll pull out this reference as well okay so this is fantastic it's a really really quick brief skim of the paper which allows you to understand what the methods are what the results were and what the key highlights are without going into the full depth if you do need to understand it in more depth of course take your time to read it in more depth of course but for this purpose we don't need

to know more than just those points now that you've read the paper and you've quickly skimmed through it you want to upload it to this website called explain paper and I'll show you what that looks like so I've uploaded my paper onto explain paper you upload the PDF or you can give the link to the website and for the paper and then what you can do is you can ask it to explain different parts of this paper at a different level so let's say I want to explain this part I can customize my explanation so

I can say make it uh really basic for a five-year-old middle school high school undergrad graduate or for an expert I'm going to say for an undergrad because I think I just want a more General understanding of it and as you can see it gives you a really nice background and understanding um of this particular topic so it gives you a background and then it gives you related resources so I'm assuming these are going to be other websites oh my gosh this is really good it gives you actual research papers that are linked to explain

paper let's try a different thing so actually what's something that I tried which I think is really important is as I mentioned to you earlier when you're reading your figures and you're trying to understand them one thing you should look at are the legends so I've just highlighted one of the figure Legends so figure two figure Legends and I'm going to say to explain it to me because I find that especially when you're reading figures and you're trying to understand papers for the first time just trying to understand what they're saying can be really difficult

so and this this case it says figure figure 2 shows the results of an experiment conducted on EHT so that's really good in the presence of tkas and controls panel a displays this panel B displays that and it just goes into a bit it just makes it a little bit more simple and you can ask a follow-up question as well so that's really nice um and then there's related resources too so I think this is really nice and and the fact that you're able to get an explanation on maybe some aspects of the literature that

you didn't understand is really helpful the things I'll ask you about would be what the main findings are what the methods were and why the justification was for the methods used I'd ask about the implications of results the main conclusions and also any limitations that were found in the paper these are all things that tell me whether or not this is something that I want to take forward and use in my literature review in the future or used to indicate anything in my own research so using this method you are combining traditional reading of you

know research paper which with AIS you're taking both aspects bringing it together and really understanding the paper as efficiently and as quickly as possible without having to read the paper from front to back like I said this applies for some papers but not for all so take a pinch of salt use away where necessary if you enjoyed this video let me know and let me know if you are planning on starting to read some literature if you're starting a PhD program soon or if you're starting University soon let me know if you're planning on adopting

this method and if you do adopt it let me know if you find it useful I'll see you in my next video bye foreign