In this talk Nada Amin and William Byrd gave advice of how to read a paper i intend to follow when i'm reading papers :
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Start with the best papers on the subject you are interseted in and start with the introductory or survery papers or read dissertation of graduates.
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Start with the examples in the paper then look at the rules and try to code them or some close examples.
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look first at introduction and abstract then at the bibliography and once you see a paper referenced a lot it must be important then go read it (notice that this works also for books).