How to read papers?

Andrew Ng gave an career advice lecture at Stanford in 2019 where he also mentioned how to read academic papers.

Read it taking multiple passes through the paper:

1. Title + Abstract + Figures
2. Intro + Conclusions + Figures + Skim rest
3. Read text but skip math
4. Read all of it but skip what doesn’t make sense

which boils down to:

Go from efficient and high information content first and dig into the harder bits gradually

Some of the questions to keep in mind during the process (and to decide whether to go to the next step):

• What did authors try to acomplish?
• What are the key elements of the approach?
• What can you use yourself?
• What other references do you want to follow?

It is worth watching, as it also sumarizes the process of creating and reviewing the paper to give rationale for that process.