About reading research papers

Question

I was looking at this recommendation list,

http://www.sns.ias.edu/pitp/2010files/prereading2010.html

I guess the above is advised keeping a graduate student in mind.

• Can anyone kindly elaborate on the year/stage of career in which the target audience graduate students are in?

A basic familiarity with supersymmetry (like say the first 10 chapters of Wess and Bagger) is probably not sufficient to be able to grasp the reading list given above. - How much is expected to be known for the above list?

• I was wondering if some experts in this field can explain as to how does a graduate student begin to read these papers and how to go about it.

To may be contrast - I would normally read physics and mathematics books with extreme detail like trying understand and work out every step of the argument and would also do homeworks/assignments with equal amount of detail. Is that how one is supposed to read the recommendations made above?

• Like how much time should one devote to any one of these papers? How much in one shot? If one gets stuck (like i often do because of lack of knowledge) then what does one do?

Again to compare, my experience is that 2 weeks is typically the time that is given for a graduate level QFT homework.

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Comments

curious, thank you for seeking the advice. However, for now the questions seems vague and not providing sufficient information. Here (see [a section of our FAQ](http://theoreticalphysics.stackexchange.com/faq#dontask)) we prefer well-defined questions providing all necessary information. For example it is unclear what is the list (you were given to read, you found on the Internet, ...), what is your purpose (understand it well, get an idea, prepare for sth)... While some information are useful (e.g. what is you level) other aren't (_2 weeks_ may be little or a lot, depending on the homework).

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