Am I reading enough of the scientific literature? Should I read for breadth or depth?

My experience is almost exclusively with mathematics papers, and applies little or not at all to other fields.

Much of eykanal's post applies to math as well, but one big difference is that math papers are much more varied in their structure, not having an actual experiment to tie them together. A good paper will generally explain its organization in the introduction, however.

One point worth emphasizing is that reading a paper from front to back, trying to understand everything at each step, is usually inefficient. The most common instance is that a paper often starts with definitions which may be hard to make sense of without understanding the theorems they're used in. It's generally more effective to skim the paper several times, trying to understand more and more with each pass.

Relatedly, you'll eventually pick up the skill of picking out the most interesting ideas from a paper without reading the whole thing. Early on, though, it's probably better to read things carefully; it's very easy to fool yourself into thinking you've understood something.

As to your main question, about breadth versus depth, your first priority has to be depth, because that's what you'll ultimately need to be able to do your own research and get your degree. But if you're learning enough to do that, you want as much breadth as possible. It actually gets harder and harder to learn completely new things as you get on in your career, even when there may be direct benefits to your research to do doing so. Laying the foundations of a broad understanding of your field while in graduate school will pay off later.

This post refers to research in the STEM fields, and may not be applicable to other research topics.

One of my biggest epiphanies in research came when I learned how to read a paper. Reading scientific publications is completely different from reading literature or news. At the beginning of your research career, you can expect to spend a full day (if not more) reading through a single 8-page paper. Some tips follow:

• Most papers are divided into "Intro", "Methods", "Results", "Discussion". These are roughly broken down as follows:

  • Intro - Read this for background. There will be nothing "new" in this section. You will find it very useful to read the intro section to as many papers as you can get your hands on. While you do this, you will become fairly depressed that so much research has already been done, and you will wonder what you can do to add to the field. Speak with your advisor, he has many good ideas.
  • Methods - This will take you a VERY long time to read initially, because they go into ridiculous detail. They do this so that you, the researcher reading and interested in replicating their results, can do so. If you don't understand everything here at first, don't worry. NOTE: If you finish reading the methods section and still want to know how something worked, email the author! This is research; the guy who wrote the paper is likely another grad student/postdoc like you. He'd love to hear from you.

  • Results - This is the meat of the paper. Read this very carefully to find out what they found. Between this section and the methods section you will determine what went right, what went wrong, what is new, and what they should have done that they didn't that you can now research and publish and become a superstar.

    When you cite a paper, you will be citing from this section. If you find yourself citing a paper based on something in the Intro, you're just citing another citation.

  • Discussion - This is the author's thoughts on what the results mean. Take note of this; the author is using his or her expertise to interpret the results. If you disagree with something he or she says here, and you can back up your findings, more power to you.

• Most accomplished researchers don't actually read papers; they just read figures. A good paper will be completely in the figures. (This is particularly true in some biological sciences fields, less so elsewhere.)

• Take notes on the papers you read. Keep those notes. My method was to keep my notes in a 3-ring binder, put a little post-it tab with the author's name, and then put the paper in there as well with the notes, so each "tab" is my notes and the paper. You will read hundreds of papers during your academic career. You will want to remember what you've read.
• This is a very arduous process, and the learning curve is steep. Don't be discouraged! Reading papers is a skill, and the more you read the more proficient at understanding them you'll become.

This is about my experience in computer engineering

I found that reading for breadth was the more important approach. The area of research I was interested in was pretty fluffly and ill-defined (I thought I could make a difference by organizing it better), so that many relevant articles were categorized in totally different areas. This meant I had to have a hummingbird approach: flittering around, but drilling down when I found an important vein of data. I also kept a journal where I'd put a citation and a very brief summary of the article, so that I could come back and say "I think I read something about this last September" and then go look in an older journal. Today, I'd have my own wiki at home to keep track of this. I used to have my own "library" of PDFs that I got through university access, but that removable hard drive was stolen.

Is five pages of close reading per day enough?

If you can stay consistently at 5 pages (or 1 article) every day, you will end up far ahead of other people who study only in spurts.