GradTurkey:Reading an Academic Paper

From GradTurkey

If you have just started grad school, the number of papers you are asked to read can be quite daunting or even impossible to do. Learning to skim for key points becomes a very important skill. As you are reading a paper, you should try to answer a few key questions:

1. What is the problem the authors are trying to solve?
2. What other approaches or solutions existed at the time that this work was done?
3. What was wrong with the other approaches or solutions?
4. What is the authors' approach or solution?
5. Why is it better than the other approaches or solutions?
6. How does it perform?
7. Why is this work important?

These questions were taken from my class on Operating Systems.