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Ask HN: Where to find research papers in “layman's terms”?“

by Spinosaurus on 12/6/20, 8:44 PM with 6 comments

I sometimes browse arxiv.org and other sites as I think research papers are a great way to get a feel for what's going on at the bleeding edge of some topic.

However, I'm certainly not a domain expert in most of these topics, which makes reading these papers difficult. Is there somewhere where I can read summaries about the newest developments in some topic (e.g. math, cosmology, etc.) in layman's terms?

  • by veddox on 12/8/20, 9:48 AM

    Subscribe to a "serious" popular-science magazine (e.g. Scientific American, or Spektrum der Wissenschaft if you're German). They won't give you a comprehensive overview, but they will pick out recent highlights and offer more in-depth articles on multiple topics, at a level understandable to readers who are scientifically literate but not experts.

    Also, see if you can find good blogs by researchers in the topics you're interested in. There are some good ones out there (as an ecologist, I like "Ecology for the Masses"). Their spectrum will be a lot narrower than a magazine - constrained by the authors' expertise and interests - but they can be more "bleeding edge".

  • by impendia on 12/7/20, 5:24 PM

    Read Quanta Magazine:

    https://www.quantamagazine.org/

    Brilliant popular science writing about contemporary discoveries in math, computer science, and the physical sciences.

  • by hazz99 on 12/7/20, 2:27 AM

    I’d encourage you to just practice “reading academia”. I love reading papers - it’s like going on a Wikipedia rabbit hole, but with much more detailed information. I’m not an academic or researcher myself.

    The common advice is to read the abstract and then conclusion, and only the method if you want to dig deeper.

    Try to find a well-cited “meta analysis” or “literature review” in the field you’re looking into. These will common on the current state of the research field, and reference influential papers. They’re a great starting point.

    I find myself needing to do something analogous to “suspending disbelief” when reading about a new topic. There is usually a lot of terminology I don’t understand, but I put up with it for a while. Eventually it makes sense. Other times, I need to look up the actual definitions.

  • by Lutger on 12/7/20, 6:33 AM

    For computer science, the morning paper has interesting discussions on cs related papers: https://blog.acolyer.org/

  • by jrpt on 12/7/20, 3:09 AM

    Google Scholar is good for finding papers on topics you want to search for.

    Following Twitter is good for discovering things you didn't know to search for.

    I also think magazines are good to get for general reading, for example: IEEE Spectrum, Scientific American, Nature, Physics Today, etc.