Quantcast
  • Register
PhysicsOverflow is a next-generation academic platform for physicists and astronomers, including a community peer review system and a postgraduate-level discussion forum analogous to MathOverflow.

Welcome to PhysicsOverflow! PhysicsOverflow is an open platform for community peer review and graduate-level Physics discussion.

Please help promote PhysicsOverflow ads elsewhere if you like it.

News

PO is now at the Physics Department of Bielefeld University!

New printer friendly PO pages!

Migration to Bielefeld University was successful!

Please vote for this year's PhysicsOverflow ads!

Please do help out in categorising submissions. Submit a paper to PhysicsOverflow!

... see more

Tools for paper authors

Submit paper
Claim Paper Authorship

Tools for SE users

Search User
Reclaim SE Account
Request Account Merger
Nativise imported posts
Claim post (deleted users)
Import SE post

Users whose questions have been imported from Physics Stack Exchange, Theoretical Physics Stack Exchange, or any other Stack Exchange site are kindly requested to reclaim their account and not to register as a new user.

Public \(\beta\) tools

Report a bug with a feature
Request a new functionality
404 page design
Send feedback

Attributions

(propose a free ad)

Site Statistics

205 submissions , 163 unreviewed
5,047 questions , 2,200 unanswered
5,345 answers , 22,709 comments
1,470 users with positive rep
816 active unimported users
More ...

  About reading research papers

+ 1 like - 0 dislike
454 views

I was looking at this recommendation list,

http://www.sns.ias.edu/pitp/2010files/prereading2010.html

I guess the above is advised keeping a graduate student in mind.

  • Can anyone kindly elaborate on the year/stage of career in which the target audience graduate students are in?

A basic familiarity with supersymmetry (like say the first 10 chapters of Wess and Bagger) is probably not sufficient to be able to grasp the reading list given above. - How much is expected to be known for the above list?

  • I was wondering if some experts in this field can explain as to how does a graduate student begin to read these papers and how to go about it.

To may be contrast - I would normally read physics and mathematics books with extreme detail like trying understand and work out every step of the argument and would also do homeworks/assignments with equal amount of detail. Is that how one is supposed to read the recommendations made above?

  • Like how much time should one devote to any one of these papers? How much in one shot? If one gets stuck (like i often do because of lack of knowledge) then what does one do?

Again to compare, my experience is that 2 weeks is typically the time that is given for a graduate level QFT homework.

This post has been migrated from (A51.SE)
asked Dec 3, 2011 in Theoretical Physics by curious01 (5 points) [ no revision ]
curious, thank you for seeking the advice. However, for now the questions seems vague and not providing sufficient information. Here (see [a section of our FAQ](http://theoreticalphysics.stackexchange.com/faq#dontask)) we prefer well-defined questions providing all necessary information. For example it is unclear what is the list (you were given to read, you found on the Internet, ...), what is your purpose (understand it well, get an idea, prepare for sth)... While some information are useful (e.g. what is you level) other aren't (_2 weeks_ may be little or a lot, depending on the homework).

This post has been migrated from (A51.SE)

Your answer

Please use answers only to (at least partly) answer questions. To comment, discuss, or ask for clarification, leave a comment instead.
To mask links under text, please type your text, highlight it, and click the "link" button. You can then enter your link URL.
Please consult the FAQ for as to how to format your post.
This is the answer box; if you want to write a comment instead, please use the 'add comment' button.
Live preview (may slow down editor)   Preview
Your name to display (optional):
Privacy: Your email address will only be used for sending these notifications.
Anti-spam verification:
If you are a human please identify the position of the character covered by the symbol $\varnothing$ in the following word:
p$\hbar$ysicsOverfl$\varnothing$w
Then drag the red bullet below over the corresponding character of our banner. When you drop it there, the bullet changes to green (on slow internet connections after a few seconds).
Please complete the anti-spam verification




user contributions licensed under cc by-sa 3.0 with attribution required

Your rights
...