Question

Seeing this as an academic community, I hope this question is on-topic. Academia is still a long way from beta :(

I have a few questions about reading journal papers in the field of engineering/applied physics.

How do you keep and schedule a reading list?
From the more recent papers, how do you track down the one (or few) papers that started an idea or technology?
Then conversely, how do you move forward in time to trace how that technology evolved? How do you decide which is the next paper to read?
(I think being able to do the tasks of 2 and 3 could help me formulate my own research questions in the future)
How do you retain the gist of the information you read from an article?
How do you do the dirty work of the above? What software do you use, if at all? If you write it down in a notebook, what are the essential data points? Like the date you read the paper, publication date, title, author, then writing down (or illustrating) what you see with your mind's eye the information that the article presented, and... anything else?
I envision a notebook with the ideas I learned, then posing my own questions after reading each article. How do you do it?

You may (or may not) answer those questions one-by-one, but they're there to give you an idea of what I want to find out. Offers to make this community wiki are very welcome.

Answer 1

Using a wiki: you can write pages about your current knowledge of a specific topic with links to papers and books you'd like to read. You can use either a personal wiki running on your own notebook or an online version (the wiki software that Wikipedia uses is open source, free, and not too difficult to install and get running). An example of a wiki that started as a notebook of a reading list (sort of) is the nLab.

Use review papers. Identify the core people of a specialized research community and search for their papers. Besides, finding the papers that really started an idea is difficult, most of the time, there is no simple solution.

Usually by interpolation: If there are review papers, these will sometimes list intermediate papers, at least they will give a hint at the historical development of an idea.

Do you have to formulate those yourself or do you have an advisor? The easiest way is to ask the experts what they are working on. Another way is to solve problems of increasing difficulty until you think you solved one where you cannot find a solution in the literature.

Again, use a wiki. You can always expand and restructure a wiki, search engines and hyperlinks are your friends when you use a wiki.

You can measure your progress by looking at the history of your wiki pages (and become embarrassed if you find a wiki page you wrote a year ago which says that "I need to read this paper soon!".)

Have an "open questions" paragraph on your wiki pages.

Sorry for being somewhat repetitive :-)

A good example for a reading list for a specific topic that I haven't had the time to pursue is this: AQFT on curved spacetime.