Research methods and everyday tools
From understanding research to finding papers, experimenting, writing, and communicating. Choose material for what you are doing now, then return to the corresponding workflow page.
Understanding research: reading, thinking, and the unknown
Why are research skills so seldom taught? — Michael Nielsen — An English essay drawing on physics research to compare research skills with classroom problem-solving and discuss how researchers develop a way of working.
Advice to a Beginning Graduate Student — Manuel Blum — English advice on reading, thinking, research, and writing. Begin with top-down reading: skip ahead around a question, then fill knowledge gaps.
A Survival Guide to a PhD — Andrej Karpathy — A 2016 personal blog about research, independence, and sustained effort during a PhD. Start with daily research and ways of working.
The importance of stupidity in scientific research — Martin A. Schwartz — A one-page English essay from 2008 about moving from questions with known answers into genuine uncertainty. Useful when beginning research.
How Do I Get Started in Research? — Stanford Academic Advising — Undergraduate advice on starting from interests, faculty conversations, and projects. Institutional programs are intended for Stanford students.
Growth, university life, and asking for help
Shanghai Jiao Tong University Survival Manual — A Chinese collective account of learning, university environments, and personal choices, grounded in SJTU students' experiences.
How To Ask Questions The Smart Way, Chinese translation — Technical communication advice. Consult how to explain goals, attempts, environment, and evidence when writing a help request or GitHub issue.
Principles of Effective Research — Michael Nielsen — A long English personal essay about how time, habits, and self-development influence long-term research.
Crash Course Philosophy — Short English philosophy videos. Choose topics in knowledge, values, and ethics to explore questions beyond your university courses.
Finding papers, tracing sources, and saving material
Google Scholar Search Help — Official help for searching by author and title, following citations and related papers, and using search syntax.
AMiner platform guide — Chinese product documentation for scholarly search, Q&A, and reading. Learn the features and follow citations back to papers.
Zotero: The Basics — Official introduction to saving, organizing, and citing sources. Start with collections, items, and attachments.
OpenReview documentation — Official documentation for paper versions, public reviews, author responses, and related functions.
Hugging Face Daily Papers — An entry to daily papers and discussion. Follow interesting work to the original paper, code, and project.
Obsidian｜Local Markdown notes and links between papers, questions, and projects.
Zotero Integration｜Import Zotero citations, notes, and PDF annotations into Obsidian; setup is documented in the repository.
Zotero Connector｜Save bibliographic information and available attachments from your browser.
Scholaread 靠岸学术｜Paper reading, translation, and notes; irene uses it alongside Obsidian.
切问 / Qiewen｜Search for papers from a research question, then read and compare related work.
Reading a first paper and understanding publication
How to Read a Paper — S. Keshav — A two-page English guide to three-pass reading: establish what a paper does, then decide how deeply to read. Try it with a paper beside you.
Mu Li: paper-reading index — Chinese close-reading videos. Start with how to read a paper, then watch how he examines an abstract, figures, experiments, and structure in a paper you are studying. Transformer close reading
ACL Anthology — A natural-language-processing paper archive. Search by title, author, or venue for papers, versions, and citation information.
Proceedings of Machine Learning Research — ML conference and workshop proceedings. Find formal papers, supplementary material, and related work from the same event.
Experiments, tuning, diagnosis, and evaluation
A Recipe for Training Neural Networks — Karpathy — English training experience from 2019. A diagnosis sequence built around inspecting data, starting simply, and checking fit.
Deep Learning Tuning Playbook — Google Research — An English tuning handbook. Consult initial setup, experiment organization, and optimization once you are running experiments.
scikit-learn: Common pitfalls and recommended practices — Official examples of leakage, inconsistent preprocessing, and randomness, with incorrect and recommended approaches side by side.
Task-Specific LLM Evals that Do & Don't Work — Eugene Yan — An English practical blog on choosing what and how to evaluate for a specific LLM task. Useful when an application already exists and needs evaluation.
Jupyter｜Keep code, analysis, tables, and figures together in a notebook.
Rainbow CSV｜Distinguish CSV/TSV columns and check column consistency in VS Code.
Writing, LaTeX, Markdown, and presentation
How to write a great research paper — Simon Peyton Jones — English talk and slides on communicating the problem, contribution, and argument. Useful while structuring a paper.
MLNLP Paper-Writing-Tips — A Chinese writing checklist for checking format, expression, and submission details once you have a draft.
Learn LaTeX in 30 minutes — Overleaf — An introductory tutorial covering text, equations, figures, and citations before applying a venue template.
Markdown Guide: Basic Syntax — A syntax reference for headings, links, lists, images, and code blocks, useful for documents and GitHub READMEs.
How to give a great research talk — Simon Peyton Jones and others — Talks and slides, including a Chinese slide entry, on organizing information around the audience and planning a research presentation.
Fundamentals of Data Visualization — Claus O. Wilke — An open illustrated book. Consult chart selection, colors, and readability for the figure you are making.
AstraDraw — A collaborative whiteboard and presentation project marked Alpha in its repository. Try it for organizing diagrams and presentations.
LaTeX Workshop｜Build and preview LaTeX and complete citations in VS Code with a local TeX installation.
Code Spell Checker｜Check English spelling in notes, READMEs, and code comments.
AI in research: tasks, checks, and reuse
Building effective agents — Anthropic — An English engineering article from 2024 comparing fixed workflows and autonomous agents, and extending simple structures gradually.
How I use LLMs — Karpathy — An English video demonstrating LLM use in everyday tasks; a concrete collection of tool-use examples.
Building A Generative AI Platform — Chip Huyen — An English engineering blog connecting data, models, retrieval, and evaluation from a systems perspective. Read after building a simple generative-AI application.
Full Stack Deep Learning — Courses, talks, and engineering resources covering data, development, and deployment beyond the model. Choose by your current project stage.
irene · Paper-reading toolkit｜Paper-reading tools from irene, whose workflow uses Grill Me to question understanding.