Reading academic papers shouldn’t take 4 hours per paper when you’re juggling a full-time job, family responsibilities, and a PhD.
Last week, a paid subscriber emailed they don’t take getting this advice for granted. They’ve tried my rebuttal and polite decline phrasebook for peer review from Notion and said: “it worked great for me with my ADHD.” One thing I often forget is how useful some of the tools in my paid newsletter are for people with all kinds of academic challenges. I’m glad to see them help people.
Yet most part-time doctoral students waste entire weekends trying to thoroughly read every paper in their literature review. You highlight every paragraph. You take detailed notes on every section. You try to memorize the methodology. And by Sunday night, you’ve read 3 papers but you’re exhausted, your family barely saw you, and you still have 47 more papers to review before you can finally write your related works section for your paper. The reality is that reading papers this way doesn’t just burn your limited time. It keeps you stuck in coursework mode when you should be in researcher mode, which delays your publication (and possibly graduation) by months or even years.
So today, we’re looking at the S³ loop, a simple 3-step system that lets you extract the core value from any academic paper in under 10 minutes. And I promise to keep it straightforward for you.
1. Scan the paper for its core argument
Your goal in the scan phase is to answer one question in under 3 minutes: What does this paper actually claim to contribute?
Start with the abstract. Read it once, straight through, without highlighting or taking notes. You’re looking for the research question and the main finding. Most abstracts follow a predictable structure: background context, research gap, what the study did, what the study found, and why it matters. The findings and contributions usually appear in the third or fourth sentence.
Next, jump to the figures and tables. Academics love to bury their most relevant evidence in visuals because these take the most work to create. A well-designed figure tells you what the author thinks is the strongest proof of their argument. Look at the figure captions first. If they’re well done, they summarize what you’re supposed to see. Then examine the figure itself for patterns, differences, or trends that support the paper’s claim.
Finally, read the first and last paragraph of the discussion section. The first paragraph usually restates the main finding in context. The last paragraph usually addresses limitations and future research directions. These two paragraphs tell you what the author actually proved versus what they hoped to prove.
You now have the paper’s core argument in your head. Now, write it down. This process often only takes 2-3 minutes per paper, and you can scan 20 papers this way in an hour.
2. Select one section that challenges or extends your current understanding
After scanning, most papers will either confirm what you already know or offer something new. You’re, of course, looking for new stuff. Cause research.
If the paper confirms your existing knowledge, you’re done. Add it to your reference manager with a two-sentence note about its main finding and move on. You don’t need to read the entire paper just because it exists. (That being said, if the paper ever piques your curiosity, you can, of course, read it anyway. We’re just trying to be efficient here.)
But if the paper presents something that contradicts your assumptions, introduces a new method, or applies a familiar concept in an unfamiliar context, that’s when you select one section to read in detail.
The method section is usually the best choice for this deeper read. Methods reveal how the researchers actually found their results, which helps you evaluate whether their conclusions are justified. A paper might claim that “intervention X improves outcome Y,” but the method section might only document that they tested X on 12 undergraduate students over one short session, which dramatically changes how you should interpret their findings.
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Read your selected section twice. First pass is for comprehension: What did they do? Second pass is for evaluation: Does this approach actually test what they claim it tests? Most methodological flaws become obvious on the second read. Skim other sections briefly if things are still unclear.
This step usually takes 5-10 minutes per paper, but you’re only doing it for papers that matter to your research.
3. Synthesize the key insight by writing 3 sentences in your own words
The final step converts your reading into usable research knowledge. It makes the reading of the paper valuable to you.
Open your reference manager or literature review document and write exactly three sentences about the paper. First sentence: What the paper claims. Second sentence: How the paper supports that claim. Third sentence: How this paper relates to your research question.
For example: “This paper reframes systematic review quality in HCI through an umbrella review methodology, which shows that CHI systematic reviews systematically underreport search strategies, quality assessment procedures, and synthesis methods compared to PRISMA standards. The paper provides domain-specific guiding questions and best practices for a practical intervention to improve methodological transparency without imposing rigid biomedical review standards incompatible with HCI’s methodological pluralism. If I conduct a systematic review on motivation factors in VR adoption and sustained use, this paper provides the quality checklist and reporting standards to ensure my review meets reproducibility benchmarks and avoids the search strategy and synthesis gaps common in HCI reviews.”
(Here’s the reference for the example paper: Rogers, K., Hirzle, T., Karaosmanoglu, S., Toledo Palomino, P., Durmanova, E., Isotani, S., & Nacke, L. E. (2024). An umbrella review of reporting quality in CHI systematic reviews: Guiding questions and best practices for HCI. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 31(5), Article 57.)
The act of writing forces synthesis. You can’t write three clear sentences about a paper unless you actually understood it. Yes, you could use AI for this, but it will prevent you from actually synthesizing the paper in your own head. And if you can’t write three sentences after scanning and selecting, that usually means the paper isn’t relevant enough to include in your related work (based on your current research question).
These three sentences become the building blocks of the related works literature review for your current paper. When you sit down to write, you’re not starting from scratch , but it lets you assemble your pre-written summaries into a coherent narrative. A 50-paper literature review becomes a 150-sentence drafting exercise instead of a terrifying blank page.
This step usually takes 3–5 minutes per paper (or a little longer if you’re new to this), but it saves you 10+ hours when you start writing your actual literature review chapter.
The complete S³ loop takes 10-15 minutes per paper once you’ve practice this a little. You can process 4-6 papers per hour, which means you can review 30-40 papers in a single Saturday morning. This leaves your afternoon free for family time or the other parts of your life that matter.
Most PhD students don’t understand yet that reading papers and understanding papers are two different skills. Reading is a skill that requires time that most part-time PhD students don’t have enough of, and understanding a paper requires a system that you can execute quickly. The S³ loop is such a system.
When you scan before you read, select before you commit, and synthesize before you move on, you stop wasting time on papers that don’t advance your research. You focus. You build your knowledge of related work incrementally instead of all at once. And you submit your paper (or defend your PhD) months earlier because you’re not stuck in endless reading loops that get you nowhere.
Start with your next paper. Set a timer for 3 minutes and scan. If it’s relevant, select one section and read it. Then write your three sentences. Do this 10 times and you’ll have processed 10 papers in under 2 hours. something that would have taken you an entire weekend using your old approach.
Most reviewers really don’t care how many papers in your field you’ve read. They only care about how well you understand the literature so that you can situate your work in it properly. You want to know where your research fits. The S³ loop gives you that understanding without sacrificing your weekends, your family time, or your sanity.
Try it out and let me know how it works for you.
P.S.: Curious to explore how we can tackle your research struggles together? I've got three suggestions that could be a great fit: A seven-day email course that teaches you the basics of research methods. Or the recordings of our AI research tools webinar and PhD student fast track webinar.
Bonus Content
Paid subscribers this week get the exact Notion template, ChatGPT prompts, and checklists I used to read papers faster with the S³ loop.
