So many papers get published you can't read them all. What are my criteria?
- Does the paper discuss topics I've researched?
- Does the paper discuss work I might be able to followup on, or get into myself?
- Is the paper by someone in my field (even if it is of no real interest, I want to know what close peers are working on)?
Not too many papers get selected by the above, so it's a good screen. What's left then whether the paper deals with on an interesting topic or an interesting result, but that can be hard to tell just looking quickly at the title and abstract, so I also look at the author. And here, all the ugly, but arguably necessary, prejudices come into play.
3 comments:
Ok - admittedly I'm a little slow on the uptake sometimes, but why am I apparently from Mars?
FWIW, I do a similar filter as you. On things like the arxiv or vjnano, my first internal question is, is this something that I care about or know something about? If the answer is no, I move on.
The comments call you a Martian:
Congratulations for keeping this blog, a lone condensed matter voice in the pervasive noisy HEP/cosmo background. A Martian trying to work out what 'physics' meant from blogs might never realize that here on earth the majority of us are actually interested in things that can easily be measured in a lab.
Ahh. I think the idea in the comment is that if someone totally unfamiliar with what "physics" means (such as an alien) tried to deduce the meaning of the term from blog postings, they'd never realize that most physicists are not string theorists.
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