PhD not required: a layperson's guide to reading journal articles
By Julia Duimovich

Despite having "learned" how to read a journal article in school, the skill stopped at reading - I didn't really know how to apply what I'd learned to my professional practice. I could read an article on byte code optimization and then go back to work without gaining any practical takeaways. I felt so discouraged because I wasn't really getting anywhere. Once you've read something, you need to be able to use it in some way, or else it becomes trivia. And it takes time to build this skill. Developing it has huge benefits, however - building your base knowledge of the field, discerning what is bragging and what has technical value, engaging with proposals that are out of your area of expertise, designing experiments, and improving your technical writing. Specifically, I'll be reviewing a paper on reverse debugging to demonstrate some techniques. You can follow along here if you'd like, although it is not recommended that you read the paper in advance. https://www.usenix.org/system/files/osdi18-cui.pdf