Academic papers

In Chemistry in particular, and the natural sciences in general, I find that reading textbooks is a much more efficient way to digest knowledge than reading papers. The largest advantage which reading papers confers relative to reading textbooks is that textbooks rarely cover the newest of the new advances in any field. I rarely find that I need to read a paper to learn something that I can't find in a textbook-- this is probably because, in the natural sciences at the undergraduate level, people don't often need to find information which was discovered within the last five years. The major exception to this trend is people who specialize heavily within a particular field, such as PhD students, postdocs, professors, and the like.

There are other reasons why reading individual journal articles can be helpful, but since you asked this question from the perspective of someone hoping to continue their efforts at self-education, I would advise you to stick with textbooks, for the most part.

Also, reading meta-analyses of papers, which will themselves be published in journals, is often better (in terms of efficiency and knowledge gathering power) than reading individual studies.

Is there any body of research of which you found the original papers much more valuable than than the popularizations or secondary sources

Medicine, in particular nutrition. My prior is that mass-media reporting is just nonsense on stilts, pretty much always, and you have to look at the original paper to see what the authors tried and what they found (which, often enough, is junk, anyway).

You might be asking the wrong question. For example, the set of papers satisfying your first question:

What are the most important or personally influential academic papers you've ever read? (call this set A)

has almost no overlap with what I would consider the set of papers satisfying:

Which ones are essential (or just good) for an informed person to have read? (call this set B)

And this is for a couple of reasons. Scientific papers are written to communicate, "We have evidence of a result--here is our evidence, here is our result." with fairly minimal grounding of where that result stands within the broader scientific literature. Yes, there's an introduction section usually filled with a bunch of citations, and yes there's a conclusion section, but papers are (at least in my field) usually directed at people that are already experts in what the paper is being written about (unless that paper is a review article).

And this is okay. Scientific papers are essentially rapid communications. They're a condensed, "I did this!". Sometimes they're particularly well written and land in category A above. But I can't think of a single paper in my A column that I'd want a layman to read. None of them would make any sense to an "informed" layman.

My B column would probably have really good popular books written by experts--something like Quantum Computing Since Democritus, or, like others have said, introductory level textbooks.

Pure unhelpful nitpickery: Your title should say "Academic", not "Accadmic". It doesn't really matter, but since it's sitting there in big letters on the main Discussion page it might be worth fixing up.

The more technical and abstruse a paper, and the less you are an expert in the area yourself, the more you should rely on secondary sources that may be able to present it in a more user-friendly way. There is, after all, no point reading the original if you can't truly understand it. However, some academic papers are written in a sufficiently comprehensible style that almost anyone can be enlightened by them.

Some that have had a particular effect on me:

• Order Defined in the Process of its Emergence, Buchanan.
• The Use of Knowledge in Society, Hayek.
• The Problem of Social Cost, Coase

The last is the most cited law review article of all time, in no small part because of its accessibility.

More in the 'personally influential' than the 'essential for an informed person':

The Long Term Evolution Experiment is one of my very favorite in the biological and physical sciences. It's decades old by now, and using that time to actually test the behavior of bacteria on true evolutionary timescales. They have seen multi-part ecosystems evolve from monocultures, and used the lab environment to 'roll back the tape' and see if evolutionary patterns can be made to jump through the same hoop twice.

I have alot of fun exploring Academia.edu (I have papers posted there myself). I think going to the source is important when you want to understand an idea at a deep level and you wish to really digest something. Research, of course, is best done at this level.

I'm currently going through this paper on attempts to explain the individuality of subjective experience, and I'm feeling relieved that this guy has made it his life's work to research questions that have obsessed me since childhood.

I would mainly look for review papers. These papers summarise a large deal of knowledge and can give you a sense of what is and isn't known within a field.