Riffing on this, there’s an academic format that I’ve seen work well that doesn’t fit too neatly into this rubric:
At each meeting, several people give 15-30m critical summaries of papers, with no expectation that the audience looks at any of the papers beforehand. If the summaries prompt anyone in the audience to express interest or ask good questions, the discussion can continue informally afterward.
This isn’t optimized at all for producing new insights during the meeting, but I think it works well in areas (like much of AI) where (i) there’s an extremely large/dense literature, (ii) most papers make a single point that can be summarized relatively briefly, and (iii) it’s possible to gather a fairly large group of people with very heavily overlapping interests nad vocabulary.
I agree, this is a common format I’ve experienced in academia.
For what it’s worth, I’ve found that it sometimes evolves into unnecessary criticisms of the paper, and sometimes the criticisms aren’t really correct (i.e. the author isn’t there to defend the method and perhaps the presenter hasn’t quite understood the paper or reasoning themselves).
I’ve started to believe that this reading group format might actually contribute to why a lot of PhD students feel so frozen/overwhelmed when writing papers of their own… they watch perfectly fine papers get ritually dunked on once a week, and then those criticisms get embedded into their inner critic and sabotage their writing progress! :-)
Riffing on this, there’s an academic format that I’ve seen work well that doesn’t fit too neatly into this rubric:
At each meeting, several people give 15-30m critical summaries of papers, with no expectation that the audience looks at any of the papers beforehand. If the summaries prompt anyone in the audience to express interest or ask good questions, the discussion can continue informally afterward.
This isn’t optimized at all for producing new insights during the meeting, but I think it works well in areas (like much of AI) where (i) there’s an extremely large/dense literature, (ii) most papers make a single point that can be summarized relatively briefly, and (iii) it’s possible to gather a fairly large group of people with very heavily overlapping interests nad vocabulary.
I agree, this is a common format I’ve experienced in academia.
For what it’s worth, I’ve found that it sometimes evolves into unnecessary criticisms of the paper, and sometimes the criticisms aren’t really correct (i.e. the author isn’t there to defend the method and perhaps the presenter hasn’t quite understood the paper or reasoning themselves).
I’ve started to believe that this reading group format might actually contribute to why a lot of PhD students feel so frozen/overwhelmed when writing papers of their own… they watch perfectly fine papers get ritually dunked on once a week, and then those criticisms get embedded into their inner critic and sabotage their writing progress! :-)