How to Read a Research Paper [pdf]
On a related note, I just realized this week that there was an entire category of software dedicated to doing something I've been painstakingly doing manually for years, organizing your collection of papers.<p>They are called reference managers, and will extract the title/year/author/abstract so you can quickly glance at that obscure "iccp2012.pdf" you downloaded last month and know if it's relevant or not to your current task. Provide full text search on your entire collection, synchronization between home and work, etc.<p>Coming from an engineering background I had no idea these existed, but it sure will save me a lot of time and frustration.