Reviewing Like a Boss

Helpful links:

Reading and reviewing research papers in a structured way helps the reader learn a new concepts, form an educated opinion, and develop their personal taste. There are many resources online that to help the daunting task. Start with a read of the first link above, and then other links above for instructions and tips.

As a supplement to the links above, here are five tips for reviewing papers: 1) Take notes on the paper (printed or electronically). 2) The first read should be quick and give you an understanting of the layout paper (headings) and what is described. 3) Read again, highlight any claims made by the authors. 4) Read another time, more closely to understand methods and evidence supporting claims. 5) Repeat any of the above steps as necessary.

Each review submission should be, in a plain text, ascii format (txt). It is a good idea to organize both the papers you will be review and your set of reviews. The papers refer to eachother and revisiting your review may be helpful. The length of the review should be about one page. Please use the markdown format to structure your paper. The paper should contain the following elements.

A quick two sentence summary of the paper (think of this as a tweet to quickly remind yourself of the paper);
A deeper, more extensive outline of the main points of the paper, (a) description of any methods algorithms/data structures, (b) A description of how they validate their results;
Explicitly state the key innovations you found in the paper (3+);
Any limitations or weakness you found in the paper (3+);
Your opinion of the paper; primarily, the quality of the ideas and its potential impact;

Example template

Below is an example template you can use to fill out and submit your reviews. A ^ is appended to the mandatory sections. Keep each section below so I will not miss the inclusion of the sections while grading. The summary should acknowledge each main point presented by the paper. You should aim to have at least 3 strengths and 3 weaknesses; this is often the hardest part of reviewing.

# {Student Name}, {email address}^

# {Paper ID}^
# {Paper Title}^
## {authors}^

# Tweet (280 characters) Heading^
Small summary here (2 sentences or 240 characters)

# Summary^
Your full summary (2-3 paragraphs)

# Key innovations of the paper^

Enumerate 4 key innovations or strengths in the paper.

1.
2.
3.
4.

# Limitations/Weaknesses^

Enumerate 4 weaknesses in the paper.

1.
2.
3.
4.

# Take aways 

Optionally, add any additional information, notes or thoughts that you had while reading the paper.

Grading

Full-credit: Review is thourough, well-summarized and has insightful discussions on each point. Has three or more strengths and weaknesses.
Half-credit: Review only has a shallow answers with some misson fields and missing discussion of the key points.
One-tenth credit: The review is not in the correct format and an attempt was not made.

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