Academic struggling with staying on top of reading current research

[cfoley]

Maybe maths papers are more densely packed than chemistry ones.

[Suelin23]

I've started distinguishing between studying and reading. I get a mix of reading to do that's within my field of expertise and well outside it. Reading material is something I can pick up and read and take notes. Study material is something I can't understand straight away, I might need to use Wikipedia to look up some of the terms, or need to mind map it to link all the bits together and try and work out what the writer is saying. As an engineer, reading biological science journal articles can get tough, so I would put identify them as study materials not read/review items.
Read review I think you could speed read, but not study items.

[alsa]

A most interesting topic. I have struggled with this same issue as well. I am not an academician either, but anything I come across on the web that I would like to read later I now simply send to my Instapaper queue.

I have now also a weekly recurring action in my task manager where it prompts me to spend half an hour three times a week to specifically read through my Instapaper articles.

By the way, while we are on the subject of Instapaper, I now sort my articles by oldest first. This way, I am not tempted to work with the newest additions first and let the old stuff sit there, ruminate, and possibly become irrelevant as time goes by