How To Critique A Research Paper

Guidelines for writing a paper critique

Format

• At most 2 pages
• Put yourself in the shoes of a reviewer for a conference or journal
• Give constructive feed back to the authors
• For every criticism, make a suggestion to improve the paper
• Mention also the good aspects of the paper
• If you don't understand something, mention it and explain why you are having trouble to understand

Suggested questions to structure your critique

Overview

• What's the paper about?
• What are the contributions?
• What's the take home message?

Significance and originality

• Are the ideas novel/original?
• Are the contributions significant?

Soundness

• Are the ideas presented technically correct?
• Are the proofs accurate?
• Are the algorithms correct?

Empirical evaluation:

• Are the ideas/algorithms empirically evaluated?
• If some assumptions are made, are they realistic?
• Is scalability demonstrated?

Related work:

• Is the paper properly situated with respect to related work?
• Is there a brief survey of related work?
• Do the authors explain similarities and differences with previous work?

Readability:

• Is the paper well structured?
  • Does the abstract properly accurately summarize the paper?
  • Do the introduction and conclusion clearly explain the contributions and the take home message?
  • Is the flow of ideas easy to follow?
• Is the paper well written?
  • Are all the technical terms and abbreviations explained?
  • Are there important grammatical errors?
  • Are there a lot of typos?

answer these questions