A paper review is a short essay (3-4) pages reporting what you have learned from reading a research paper. Writing reviews for the papers you have read is a great way to sharpen your paper reading skills such a review is typically structured in three sections:
1. Summary
Give a brief summary of the work in your own words. This section demonstrates your understanding of the paper, and as such it should answer the following question:
· What is the research problem the paper attempts to address?
· What are the claimed contributions of the paper?
· How do the authors substantiate their claims?
· What are the conclusions?
· It is imperative that you use your own word to summarize the paper .another way to think of it is that you
are writing an alternative, elaborate abstract for the paper.
2. Evaluation
Evaluate the work by answering the following question:
· Is the research problem significant?
· Are the contributions significant?
· Are the claims valid?
Learn to be fair: point out the strengths and weaknesses of the work. if you are reading that has been published for a while , make sure you are reading the paper in the right historical context : what seems to be obvious now might have been ground- breaking then.
3. Synthesis:
Generate any interesting thoughts you have on the work by consulting the following questions:
· What is the crux of the research problem?
· What are some alternative approaches to address the research problem?
· What is a better way to substantiate the claim of the authors?
· What is a good argument against the case made by the authors?
· How can the research results be improved?
· Can the research results be applied to another context?
· What are the open problems raised by this work?
· Bottom-line can we do better than the authors?