In line with my continuing self eduction...
What are the most important or personally influential academic papers you've ever read? Which ones are essential (or just good) for an informed person to have read?
Is there any body of research of which you found the original papers much more valuable than than the popularizations or secondary sources (Wikipedia articles, textbook write ups, ect.), for any reason? What was that reason? Does anyone have a good heuristic for when it is important to "go to the source" and when someone else's summation will do? I have theoretical preference for reading the original research, since if I need to evaluate an idea's merit, reading what others in that field read (instead of the simplified versions) seems like a good idea, but it has the downside of being harder and more time-consuming.
I have wondered if the only reason to bother with technical sounding papers that are hard to understand is that you have to read them (or pretend to read them) in order to cite them.
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:
The last is the most cited law review article of all time, in no small part because of its accessibility.
On the topic of which: an economics paper which made a big impression on me is Hahnel & Sheeran's "Misinterpreting the Coase Theorem" (Journal of Economic Issues, 43, pp. 215-237). Unfortunately there appears to be no freely available copy of the published version online, but there is a preprint without the figures. It's a bit less accessible than Coase's paper, but I imagine pretty well anyone who's taken a microeconomics class could follow it.