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 wi

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 :) Anyway, what topic are you interested in?