[personlurking]

> The publish or perish mentality in academia leads to more noise and less signal.

Perhaps a Google-like ranking would help. The more cited a paper is (in the bibliography), the more it might not be noise. Then again, I don't like the idea that what is popular is also the best.

[seanmcdirmid]

One of the tricks to getting your paper in (in many, not all, fields) is to cite as many PC papers as possible. It can turn into one big citation circle jerk, or at least an echo chamber.

[Radiant]

That was actually inspiration for Google's PageRank algorithm: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank#History

[jcfrei]

Do you know google scholar? That's basically what it's for. Might as well be added to the list of advices: searching for the important papers with google scholar or CiteSeerX.

[personlurking]

Touché. I have heard of it but never used it since I'm not required by my work to read scientific papers.