When I first started out reading papers, I approached this the wrong way. One day, I’d suddenly decide “hmm, complexity theory is pretty interesting, let’s go on arXiv and look at some recent complexity theory papers“. Then, I’d open a few, attempt to read them, get confused, and conclude I’m not smart enough to read complexity theory papers. Why is this a bad idea? A research paper exists to answer a very specific question, so it makes no sense to pick up a random paper without the background context.
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- [note::I suspect I'm very prone to doing this.]

Citation count is a good indicator of a paper’s importance and merit.
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If the paper has under 10 citations, take its claims with a grain of salt (even more so if it’s an arXiv preprint and not a peer-reviewed paper). Over 100 citations means the paper has made a significant contribution; over 1000 citations indicates a landmark paper in the field and is probably worth reading.
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The goal of your first reading of a paper is to first get a high level overview of the paper
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(highlight:: As you go through the paper, here are some good questions that you should be asking yourself:
What is the problem being solved?
What approaches have been tried before, and what are their limitations?
What is this paper’s novel contribution?
What experiments were done, using what dataset? How successful were the results?
Can the method in this paper be applied to my problem?
If not, what assumptions are needed for this method to work?)
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