// the find
jtleek/readingpapers
A guide to reading scientific papers
A short guide by Jeff Leek (Johns Hopkins biostatistics) on how to read academic papers — what order to read sections, how to filter by volume, how to get paywalled PDFs. It's aimed at students and researchers new to academic literature, particularly in biomedical/statistical fields.
Practical triage strategy (read 100% of titles, 1-3% of full papers) that reflects how working researchers actually operate. Section-skipping advice (skip intro and conclusions, spend time on methods) is genuinely contrarian and correct. Honest about hype pressure in science and how to calibrate skepticism. Written by someone with real credentials in the field, not a content farm.
Six years out of date — no mention of LLM-assisted paper reading, connected papers, Semantic Scholar, or Elicit, which have changed the workflow substantially. Coverage is heavily slanted toward biomedical sciences; ML/CS researchers work differently (conference papers, ArXiv-first culture) and get only a paragraph. A single README with no further structure or resources to follow up on; calls itself a guide but is closer to a 1500-word blog post. The #icanhazpdf section is a relic — Sci-Hub exists and everyone knows it.