How long does it take you to read an academic journal article?
I feel like I'm a bit slow, though I'm gaining practice. I cannot read two moderate or long-ish papers in one day. I guess part of that reason is that the field I'm mostly reading in is a field I'm new to, though in accordance with that what I'm reading often is kindo-of introductory material (linguistics, and Linguistics Handbook ed. Aronoff, 2017). A chapter is around the size of an average paper (around 25-30 pages). Another factor may be that I'm not a native speaker of English, but I think I do have a quite decent command of it especially when reading, enough to read through ~60 A4 pages in five-six hours, but I just can't do it.
So I wonder if I'm too slow or maybe exaggerating it a bit? How long does it take for you, and how many can you read, without skimming/skipping, in a "day"?
As you advance in your field you'll come to the realization that people don't read papers, they just cite them and pretend they have read them.
Academic conversation:
Translation: None of them understood this paper, the miyagi-baggins or the granger-ronaldo paper.
Jokes aside, there's a technique to reading papers. I read math papers mostly so I can't help with your field but it depends on how in-depth you want to understand the topic. If you want to be able to use the results you can do abstract -> conclusion -> look for details that you can't figure out. If you want to understand a whole theory well then it can very well take you more than a day to read a paper.
Oh I definitely recognise that pattern when reading some papers. Every field has certain names that add "free authenticity" when cited, even as a "cf."
I'm actually going from literature (BA) to linguistics (MA); I want to do research in the latter. I did know some stuff in linguistics, but especially theory is new to me. I've done nearly a month of fast-paced studying. So, would you say it's expectable that I progress rather slowly, in this context, because I am still learning the core concepts and theories of the field?
Yeah, I'd say so. My research is actually all based on two (very long, ~200 pages) papers, and it took me almost a year and a half to really understand all of it. I've always thought it more important to understand something well than fast, and I think that has worked pretty well for me so far.
It depends.
In grad school I would read 100-200 pages a day in research papers but it would involve quite a bit of skimming, highlighting, and taking notes in the margins of interesting things in the article.
Now that I am out of school and learning data science stuff on my own, it's a lot slower. I typically have to stop and check the definition of things that I don't know but are referenced in articles. That usually pulls me down as I put everything I am learning in Anki flashcard decks to review throughout the day.