Questions about statements in papers

Question

I often read papers and am stuck on important statements/equations that are not satisfactorily explained to my understanding. Sometimes references are provided, but even then it's cumbersome to recursively look up all the referenced material and many times the answer cannot be found in the provided reference. Sometimes equations/statements appear out of the blue with no chance for explanation. As I observed, most people just jump over them and proceed with the paper, but that bugs me.

What would be a good platform to ask questions related to papers? Is there any? If not, could we build one on stackexchange? It should be searchable by tags but also by the title, authors and doi of the papers.

Answer 1

If you make the post self-contained, that is (a) write the relevant portion into the post (providing a full reference to the paper, including a stable link, and, where available, a legal free copy of the paper) and (b) expand on the details of what you don't understand in the quoted portion, I don't see why it wouldn't be accepted here on Physics Stack Exchange. At worst, you may be asked to repost in Math.se, but as long as the question is based on the physics, you should be okay to ask here.

If you are just linking to the paper and say "I don't get Eq 14, can someone help?" you are likely to get the question closed (probably as unclear what you're asking) because you are providing zero context and are forcing someone to download & read a paper then try to figure out what it is you don't get and then answer that.