Dealing with review papers

We've been studying the properties of galaxies, and the relationship between the distributions of stars (and dark matter) and the motions of those stars for a couple of weeks now. I assigned a pre-reading of half of a very good review paper (the Physical Properties and Environments of Nearby Galaxies) discussing this issue, knowing that this was a challenging pre-read (long, lots of information) but it is really good stuff, so I went with it anyway.

All students took longer than I had hoped for the pre-reading, and some of them took a factor of 5 longer than I hoped to read it. We talked about strategies for reading papers, and this is what they came up with (in no profound order):

• Lots of practice helps in reading papers, getting used to the format, jargon, parts you can skip, etc.
• Print out the paper, it's a lot easier than having it on the screen (and you can take notes/highlight)
• Get an idea of the overview of the paper via abstract and section headings
• figures are usually important
• Skip technical details/data, etc; you can pick it up later
• know what you're looking for in advance (it can even allow you to search for keywords, etc)
• make marginal notes

For non-native English speakers, we discussed also the importance of regular reading of non-technical literature and getting up to speed with jargon by reading simpler background material first.