How to read an academic paper?

Posted by: adonis49 on: April 29, 2016

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How to read an academic paper?

It is beyond me why juries  on thesis, Masters or Ph.D, insist on producing voluminous books.

Probably, to initiate the candidate to learn Job’s patience for writing?

Or to give the illusion that what is produced is worth years of wasting time and energy on a book that barely anybody will ever read to refers to it?

Any one who went through this headache knows that half the time spent on a PhD program was reserved for writing the thesis. No wonder, most of these graduates gave up on writing anything afterward and refused to teach or pursue an academic life.

I suggest that professional writers who pressured their publishers to edit short books be included in such juries in order to lighten the book from redundant paragraphs.

What kills me is when you are forbidden to use the first personal in order to give an objective tone to the research. As if personal experiences are Not valid or our world views are not mainly generated from the few personal experiences we faced and tackled.

Academia Obscura‘s photo.

Academia Obscura.April 22 at 6:55pm

Note 1: Correct within an order of magnitude? This term is generally used in natural sciences when students are initiated to figure out whether a result is valid without performing any computation

Note 2: I remember that the hardest hurdle in finishing my paper was the insistence of one in the jury to print it using a special program that only him could debug. I had to wait weeks just to for him to find time to debug the program and for me to resume printing.

Note 3: If you didn’t take at least one course in experimental design and digested well the kinds of variables you are analysing, controlling and measuring and how to run an experiment, it is doubtful that you can properly read an academic paper and distinguish among the profusion of pseudo-scientific papers, the peer-reviewed papers, the biased papers, and the ones independently done by scientific scholars that are not funded by interested multinational companies or the military.

Tags: Academia Obscura, academic paper, adonis49, experimental design, How to read