Reading and understanding the latest papers is a crucial part of being a scientist, but it's not something that we're ever taught to do, explicitly, as part of a scientific education. You take classes on genetics, and then maybe you become a grad student and you start doing genetics research: but there are no classes on reading genetics papers. It's something you pick up as you go along, if you're lucky.
But reading a paper isn't one single skill: as you learn more about a particular field your understanding of the published literature tends to progress through certain stages. At least, this is my experience. Like all such "stage models" what follows is a simplification, but it's something I think I'd have found useful to have been told when I was starting out.
Stage 0 : Huh?
You don't even understand what the paper is about. If I were to ...
