There is usually very little value in individual papers. You have to read a lot of them, not entirely though. If you don't know anything about a topic, start with wikipedia, check the references, also check google and google scholar with some relevant keywords. Read some papers, read at least the introduction and the related work section. From that it's usually easy to identify what are the important references and the important keywords. After checking 5 / 10 papers you usually have a good understanding of the important problems of the topic and you can call yourself an expert :)
If you don't know what to read, why do you want to read papers? What are you hoping to get out of this? The collective academic works are immense. It is hard to know how to give advice without knowing more.
Figure out which journals cover the subject matter you're most interested in (likely ~5), and read the table of contents whenever a new issue comes out.
If you want to stay up to speed on the latest and greatest across a wide range of topics, Science and Nature are often worth a read; those are weekly.
And then once you have favorite authors, you can set up automated searches to alert you whenever they publish something.
Having a peek at a listing of the talks being presented at conferences usually gives you a sneak preview of what's going to be published "soon" since people often give talks on a subject before they publish a paper on it. Conferences are also broken into subject areas, again helping you find what's of interest to you.
Most of the ACM DL papers can be found online somewhere else (like via citeseer, or Google Scholar). For moral reasons, don't support the academic pay walls if you can help it.
Science Daily (http://www.sciencedaily.com/) is a pretty good place to scan headlines, and they link to the original sources if you wan to get to the nitty gritty.
While this doesn't help you decide on the topic, if you have even a vague sense for what you want to read about, most people just use Google Scholar.
Nearly all CS papers are posted by the authors on personal pages in PDF form. Once you've found something that has an interested abstract just go back to regular Google with the title, add "pdf" and it's almost certain you'll get a link to the file.
[edit]: Also, once you've got one paper that fits squarely into an area of interest you can then just start reading references. You'll also get a better handle on terminology which should make your Google Scholar searches more effective.
The best option is as many have pointed out - Google Scholar.
But the very next I have personally found is ssrn.com - which is an open source repository.
You will also find that more and more papers are being hosted on arXiv.org.
If I am reading a book that links to specific academic papers, I'll first try google scholar, then a google search for the primary author. If the first doesn't return a link to a free copy, you will usually find it on the authors .edu homepage.
If you have a specific topic in mind, find out the top conference(s) in the area (for many areas in CS the top resources tend to be conferences, for other topics it would be journals), and read all of the abstracts. You'll get a feeling on what is considered 'bleeding edge'.
From that start point - just 'crawl' for (a) interesting papers cited there, and (b) other things written by authors you found interesting, they'll often have the non-paywall versions of their papers available on their site.
For the lazy person who wants to cut down on the "crawling", try this listing of Best Paper Awards across pretty much every CS discipline: http://jeffhuang.com/best_paper_awards.html
Hi frigg. GuerraEarth here. You might do what I just did. I looked at your profile to see what kinds of comments you've made in the past to get an idea of your tastes before offering comment. That is what you want to do--don't just go to some site and read stuff. But thoughtfully follow your interests (your wallpaper is of Mars). I am from JPL where the Mars rovers were built. In a big sandbox. The prototypes. A play box. They build all kinds of cool stuff there. If you go to the JPL page and choose scientists that do research you like, read some of their papers. All the people at JPL are good or they aren't at JPL. And look at this really interesting new toy that let's u see the surface of the sun.
It really depend on what your topic of interest is. But This is what I do and hopefully you can apply it to any field. Identify the best academic conferences on the topic you want (eg. CCS, NDSS, ACSAC, ESORICS, USENIX Security, S&P for security conferences). Then look at the abstract on the conference website and find what you think is interesting and then find the article on the author webpages or in the conference proceedings (online for usenix other you will find in ACM Digital library or IEEE Explorer).
A bunch of prominent people in computational biology are on Twitter. I follow them and between their tweets and things they retweet a bunch of interesting papers show up.
There are many excellent sources nowadays. Especially if you're into physics or economics but not necessarily.
The most general is the Daily Roundup at National Affairs where you get titles and abstracts of papers fitting the daily theme (lousily). RSS available.
A tip: Check if your local public library offers online access to academic journals. Mine offers access to MasterFile Premier, Academic Search Complete, GreenFile, ERIC, Medline, and a bunch of others. I used this (free) access to do the majority of the research for "Experimenting With Babies."
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[ 6.0 ms ] story [ 106 ms ] threadAnyway, what topic are you interested in?
tl;dr: arXiv. But I do mathematics, so YMMV.
If you want to stay up to speed on the latest and greatest across a wide range of topics, Science and Nature are often worth a read; those are weekly.
And then once you have favorite authors, you can set up automated searches to alert you whenever they publish something.
Having a peek at a listing of the talks being presented at conferences usually gives you a sneak preview of what's going to be published "soon" since people often give talks on a subject before they publish a paper on it. Conferences are also broken into subject areas, again helping you find what's of interest to you.
Usenix conference proceedings.
There are journals that priced themselves into irrelevance (Software Practice and Experience, I'm looking at you).
I try to read a couple papers a week, usually augmenting with Wikipedia tours to cover subjects I'm weak in.
http://complexpapers.tumblr.com
of recent papers in complex systems and networks.
* Microsoft Research
* Yahoo Research
* Google Scholar
Nearly all CS papers are posted by the authors on personal pages in PDF form. Once you've found something that has an interested abstract just go back to regular Google with the title, add "pdf" and it's almost certain you'll get a link to the file.
[edit]: Also, once you've got one paper that fits squarely into an area of interest you can then just start reading references. You'll also get a better handle on terminology which should make your Google Scholar searches more effective.
But the very next I have personally found is ssrn.com - which is an open source repository.
You will also find that more and more papers are being hosted on arXiv.org.
If I am reading a book that links to specific academic papers, I'll first try google scholar, then a google search for the primary author. If the first doesn't return a link to a free copy, you will usually find it on the authors .edu homepage.
http://afinetheorem.wordpress.com/
I made a Perl script that emails you daily pubmed papers based on a list of interests, might be of use: https://github.com/bsima/daily-scholar
From that start point - just 'crawl' for (a) interesting papers cited there, and (b) other things written by authors you found interesting, they'll often have the non-paywall versions of their papers available on their site.
Combine with a few less academic and more industry ones, like strange loop, ricon, etc. Make sure these are not too advertising-y.
http://computingreviews.com/
http://www.helioviewer.org -and- http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/?type=current
https://twitter.com/PacBio is also an interesting follow, although it's limited to stuff about their tech
The most general is the Daily Roundup at National Affairs where you get titles and abstracts of papers fitting the daily theme (lousily). RSS available.
http://www.nationalaffairs.com/blog/blogger/findings-a-daily...
For arXiv there are blogs highlighting papers, like this one
http://www.technologyreview.com/contributor/emerging-technol...
For economics, be sure to subscribe to the RSS feeds of NBER and IZA. Note that those are not reviewed.
http://www.nber.org/rss/
http://www.iza.org/en/webcontent/publications/papers
Availability varies. But you can usually find a prepub by just Googling.