What Reading a Research Paper Feels Like
You’ve started a new job, you’ve stumbled into a conversation that’s been happening for several decades, and you’re feeling way too lost to even begin to follow what anyone is talking about, let alone participate. You’re confused, so you go see John, who seems to be semi-acquainted with the people having the conversation. You briefly sketch out what (you think) you heard, and tell him that you didn’t really understand anything anyone said. Maybe he can help you?
John says, “What do you mean, there’s no way I can explain everything to you, that’s too broad! We’ve been splitting up into smaller groups over the years and people keep joining us with new concerns to bring to our attention, so there’s no way I can summarize everything we’ve talked about. Is there anything specific I can help you with?”
But you don’t want to know everything, you just want to understand the one conversation you walked into. You choose an idea that was mentioned several times (let’s call it xyz) and seems probably important and ask John if he knows what it means. John gives you a very brief explanation, but you still have no idea what he’s talking about. John says, “Hmm, why don’t you go talk to Thomas? He’s the one who first introduced me to that idea, and he’s the reason I ended up here, actually. But I’m afraid xyz is a bit out of my wheelhouse since I currently focus on xzy.”
Xyz and xzy sound awfully similar to you, but since you’re still confused you can’t be sure and you’re not going to argue with John after he’s tried to help you. So you go see Thomas, and you ask him about xyz. It turns out Thomas is actually working on xyzz, which is great, since it’s much more related! But after trying to summarize the improvements you get when going from xyz to xyzz, Thomas realizes that you don’t know basic things about xy, let alone xyz. You ask Thomas to explain xy but he says, “Oh, I just kinda absorbed stuff about it by osmosis, and I’m too busy to relearn it properly to try to teach you. If you really want information go ask William, he invented xy.”
William is kinda hard to track down, but eventually you meet him in his office and prepare to ask him all sorts of questions about how he invented xy. William goes, “oh, yeah, xy! I almost forgot about that. Wait, Thomas, told you I invented xy? No no, that’s totally not what happened. I read an article about qy and realized that if I shifted a few things around it would become xy, which seemed like it could be useful to people around here! And then everyone else just ran with it.”
You try to probe for more information about xy, but William hasn’t even thought about it in over 30 years. William opens a drawer in his desk and pulls out a bunch of old diagrams. “Would this help you?” he says. “These are the original diagrams for xy, but I’m afraid they’re kind of janky. I usually save them for colleagues who want to see what kind of a wreck I was in my twenties.” You take some pictures of the diagrams, thank William for his time, and leave. On your way home it occurs to you that you forgot to ask if he still remembers anything about qy.
A few days later, you go to see Thomas again, because the diagrams are making your brain hurt and you can barely decipher some of the text. Thomas takes one look at them and says, “Oh, did Will give you the original diagrams? That’s so silly, the new ones are so much simpler! Go see Kate, she can help you find some newer diagrams. Those will be so much easier for you to read.”
At this point, you’re unsure of how hunting down these diagrams is going to help you understand the conversation, but you have no other leads, so you figure that talking to Kate won’t hurt. Kate goes to her shelf and pulls out a medium sized book.
“You probably won’t need all of it,” she says, “but it might be helpful to read the whole thing anyway. The diagrams you’re looking for should be somewhere around chapter 5.”
“Is there anything else you wanted to know?” Kate continues. “I’m not an expert, but I can probably point you in the right direction.”
“What do you work on?” You ask Kate.
“Oh, I work on xyyy and also sometimes on zxxx. A bit of a weird combination, I know, but I make it work.”
“Do you happen to know anything about xyz?”
“Xyz? I haven’t heard that one in a while. Why do you need to know about xyz?”
You tell Kate about the conversation you had with John, and all of the wild chasing you’ve done up to this moment just to try and understand a sliver of what everyone else seemed to be talking about. Kate ponders what you’ve said for a long moment.
“I have to admit,” she says, “I’m a bit out of my depth on this one. But I have pretty good reason to believe that all of those mentions of xyz were actually that group of people bashing it, and they were actually thinking about using something else as a solution. No one really believes in xyz these days, except for Thomas, who is seen as a bit of a weirdo around here. You should still read the book; it has some context that will be useful regardless. But I think the main topic of the conversation was probably something else.”
Damn it. So you have to start over? And track down more people?
Yikes.