A positive side effect of regularly reading good academic papers (or books) is that fluffy blog posts etc. are, in contrast, readily perceived as vacuous, and are thus easily ignored. [To be clear, the present blog post is a good one: it makes a good point, and is no longer than it ought to be.]
The problem is in finding the good academic papers. For someone like me who is not affiliated with a university, the best papers are often behind paywalls.
For recent stuff in computer science this is somewhat less of a problem, because most people post PDFs of their own papers on their websites. Citeseer (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/) indexes and caches the self-hosted PDFs as well.
Once you find a good paper or two (and/or the academic literature's relevant buzzwords for your issue), you can span out through the citations for quite a while. "Introduction / Survey of ..." papers (e.g. http://archives.cs.iastate.edu/documents/disk0/00/00/02/04/0...) exist mainly for the bibliography. Also, when you find someone whose name keeps coming up, look for their faculty page, e.g. Andrew Appel's (http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/papers/).
For papers that don't have .pdf or .ps files cached on Citeseer (due to primary hosting behind the ACM's paywall) try searching on Google Scholar and clicking "X other versions". Typically, the ACM is the first result, but faculty pages have publicly visible copies.
Google Scholar is really good at showing you a free PDF link if there is one, usually from Citeseer, but also from .edu sites. If you host under your own domain, like me, you are unfortunately left out. I am not sure how to get round this yet.
There are several ways around that; some depend on the field you are looking at.
At least for Mathematics, Physics and Computer Science the authors often have a working draft on their homepage. Alternatively, and in all fields, you can just write a letter or email to the author asking for an electronic copy.
Then you could befriend someone in a university---just ask around on HN, I am sure somebody will step forward and agree to download you articles from behind paywalls every once in a while. Or often just joining the library of your local university is good enough.
A complementary approach is to find a really recent general one and skip to the end for the citations. Where possible, finding the original paper on a topic (e.g. gelman & gelman on mcmc) always makes me feel like a child with ten pence for sweeets.
Go to the author's/university/lab website. You will usually find a pre-publication version or a closely related paper, months to years ahead of the actual publication. Some of the stuff you find isnt very good (too narrow, for example) but the signal to noise ratio is better than scanning lot of blogs.
The problem is often not to download the papers but to find out what paper is good if you are not in the paper's field. The number of citation is usually a good metric but how about recently published papers or draft works ?
If you really want to read a paper that is behind a paywall with an unreasonable download fee, you might try to find the university websites of the authors. They often make their papers available online from their "publications" webpage.
Alternatively, just emailing and asking the author for a pdf might work (if you're comfortable with that).
I really miss being a student and having wide access to all kinds of journals. The professional societies (like IEEE computer) do provide some access to some journals, but the coverage is so limited. One would have join all of them to get the same access that a university student has.
You can't just 'consume and digest' any paper that you come across. It's like trying to drink from a firehose. Assuming you already have a field of interest, I recommend looking at the last few years of the top conferences and journals in that field. That will give you what's trendy right now, of course. To find 'landmark papers' in a field, one way is looking at suggested readings from (possibly graduate) course websites (e.g. from OCW) in the topic of interest.
I do agree with you here, trying to consume and digest everything that comes out in one's field of interrest is not only pretty hard but also extensively time consuming.
I guess the point of the article is more to, induce people into considering more academic papers when they do research -- that is, either for their own non-academic or academic research.
I always find it interesting to read those, when they're closely related to what I'm trying to do or what I am currently doing / researching.
And as far, as trying to catch-up with a whole field of interest, often enough, there are books -- written by the same researchers that wrote the papers you missed -- that presents you the latest advancement in the field over the past years ; all the while presenting you the way of thought that accompanies these discoveries... A good example of that would be "Burst" by A.-L. Barabási, a personal favorite :)
There's another reason to read their papers, which I describe in "How to get your Professors’ Attention — along with Coaching or Mentoring" (http://jseliger.com/2010/10/02/how-to-get-your-professors%E2...): you want to signal to your professors that you're worth investing in. Most people aren't, and one way to distinguish yourself is to read their work, since the majority of students—even those who say they will—won't.
Like others are mentioning, I've always found it curious how difficult it is for people outside of academia to access good journals and articles. It's even more puzzling because in academia we're always trying to shout to the world that this knowledge ought to be utilized. That said, I think some fields have a much better relationship with industry than others. In my field of education, it's a rather big problem disseminating findings to the front line. As for tips, I've found that a good way to stay on top of knowledge broadly is to read edited handbooks and reviews. These sources might not be the newest but they certainly condense a lot of good empirical findings that have been tested over time and highlight the most important branches and directions. It's also kind of interesting to find who the grad students of the most prominent figures are and read their papers, proceedings. A) They're dying to talk about their stuff, B) They have the guidance of an experienced scholar, and C) They have that energy to drive into quite interesting and new territory.
Your last statement is very interesting. Frequently, one hears about the divide between academia and the real world, and how much research---even in CS---is unlikely to ever have practical benefits. Could you give an example or two of the ACM subscription being the key element for a step forward in your career?
Another very important point to keep in mind: ACM helps students cover travel expenses to conferences if they cannot be covered by the students themselves.
This is a tremenduous help for students that are not employed by their universities or are not covered by a professor's grant. In addition to the access to ACM's digital library, I think that a membership is money well spent (and it should be tax deductible in most countries anyways...)
While I agree that many scientific articles are worth reading, I think that it's almost impossible to read everything even in your field of interest. The point is to get the most interesting and important ones.
So I suggest reading what is called Review articles following the references if necessary.
also: textbooks are cheap (anything behind the latest edition has high supply and low demand as all of last year's students dump them).
you can receive tomes that cover vast swathes of human knowledge for the price of a sandwich. trying to educate yourself online usually doesn't compare to a really excellent textbook.
Actually, they are free. I am a graduate student in Mathematics and there is no book, on any level of mathematics that I have been unable to find for free download.
Places like www.avaxhome.ws and old.pdfchm.net are chock-full of math textbooks not to mention the torrents which can be found on isohunt.com and thepiratebay.org that consist of collections of thousands upon thousands of graduate level mainstream and esoteric mathematics texts, all high quality scans.
In total, I have many thousands of dollars worth of mathematics books, all of which I have obtained for free (and I feel justified; there's simply no cost-effective way to obtain those books on my side of the planet).
