As seanwilson has pointed out already, academic papers are written to be intelligible to experts in the field. They're not meant to be tutorials for practitione

As seanwilson has pointed out already, academic papers are written to be intelligible to experts in the field. They're not meant to be tutorials for practitioners. So you can easily get stuck if you're reading a paper in a field in which you're not an expert. I also see a lot of useful tips here such as making notes, rewriting parts of the paper, and so forth. I think these ideas only work when you're already getting something out of the paper. These tips are optimizers, they can help you get more out of a paper if you're already somewhat conversant in the field. In theory, if you're not an expert, you can keep following the citation trail, read all the papers there, become an expert and finally read the paper you actually want to read. I don't think this actually works. If you're not a expert, the paper itself will seem like gibberish. You won't know what citations are actually important and what citations were just pushed in to please a reviewer. And even if you somehow do, the citations themselves will be just as difficult to read. So what are the solutions? First, seek out accessible papers. There are a lot of tutorials that get published in magazines like the CACM and IEEE Spectrum. These are written with an explicit goal of being accessible to a technical non-expert audience, so you will get something out of these articles. Maybe if you read one such article, you'll get the big ideas in the article and then you can read the technical paper(s) that the article was based on. Since you already know the big ideas, the technical paper won't seem so daunting. And maybe now, you can follow up on a few citations. The general trick is to find alternate sources that simplify and explain the paper and then read the paper. Alternate sources can be tutorial articles, slides, blog posts, textbooks, talks and so on. This is actually how people learn to read papers in grad school. First, you go to few a masters level classes where the professors teach from papers rather than textbooks but don't necessarily expect students to read and understand all the details in the paper. Next you go to a few seminar-type classes where professors and students discuss the nuances of a number of important papers. There's a lot of non-obvious spoonfeeding that happens: the professors use their expertise to pick papers that important and accessible, they guide the discussion towards the important parts of the papers, they point out flaws and discuss methodologies, suggest projects for the students to implement and learn from, and so on. Over time, the students absorb these lessons by osmosis and become good at picking out and reading papers themselves. If you're not going to grad school yourself, you'll have to recreate this process of slowly building expertise in a field by reading papers and comprehending them and trying to implement and recreate them. The key word is slowly because you're not going to become an expert in a day, or even a month. You'll have to keep going for a year or two and slowly you'll feel like a blind man who can see more and more of his surroundings everyday.