How to find the most interesting papers?

[Vrbic]

Hello,
I'm a Ph.D. student of Astrophysics and I would like to expand my horizons in this field. The best is probably to read papers around. I don't mean just new ones. But how to effectively find papers from my field when there are so many papers for example at https://arxiv.org/ or http://adswww.harvard.edu/.
I believe that many experienced scientists are reading many papers (at least abstracts or results). Please advise me how are you effectively looking for the most interesting for you.
Thank you.

 

[Orodruin]

Your supervisor should know what papers are relevant for you. Have you asked him/her?

 

[Vrbic]

Your supervisor should know what papers are relevant for you. Have you asked him/her?

Yes, I read what he suggests, but I would like to do something more (to be more independent in a good sense), but don't spend comparable time for searching as for reading.

 

[Choppy]

Read. A lot.

As a PhD student you should have a handful of journals that you read on a regular basis. By that I mean you get an email when a new issue of each of your regular journals is out, you skim through the abstracts, and then read those articles that interest you.

And when you have a cluster of friends and colleagues who are doing this - talk to each other. Many of the most interesting papers I've found have been from someone else who saw something they thought I would find interesting.

Another option is to join or start a journal club.

 

[Dr. Courtney]

I don't think there is an objective criteria for interesting.

But once I find a few papers that are interesting to me I take several approaches to find more:
1. Look up other papers by the same author(s)
2. Look up papers that the interesting papers cite
3. Look up later papers that cite the interesting papers