I usually skim over it to see if I can make sense of it at a high level. If there are a lot of terms I don't understand I'll try to clarify those first. If the

I usually skim over it to see if I can make sense of it at a high level. If there are a lot of terms I don't understand I'll try to clarify those first. If there are lots of references I'll try to figure out if one of the references is an "important" or highly referenced by other authors, then I'll get that paper and see what the foundational work in the field is. All this assumes that you have time to really get into the material, it could take several weeks to get a sense of a single paper if I'm new to the field.