The questions you want to have answered by reading a paper are the following: 1. What are motivations for this work? For a research paper, there is an expectation that a problem has been solved that no one else has published in the literature. This problem intrinsically has two parts. The first is often unstated, what I call the people problem. The people problem is the benefits that are desired in the world at large; for example some issue of quality of life, such as saved time or increased safety. The second part is the technical problem, which is: why doesn't the people problem have a trivial solution? There is also an implication that previous solutions to the problem are inadequate. What are the previous solutions and why are they inadequate? Finally, the motivation and statement of the problem are distilled into a research question that can be addressed within the confines of this particular paper. Oftentimes, one or more of these elements are not explicitly stated, making your job more difficult.