Here's some advice that is so vague that it is probably useless. :-)  Nonetheless...

Academic papers often build on each other and reference earlier work.  When reading a paper, if one hits something they don't understand, they can look at the referenced work.  I've found this to be a waste of time, when researching something where I don't have a lot of prerequisite knowledge, because the referenced paper often refers to another, which refers to another, etc., etc., until some landmark paper.  It's more useful, I think, to find that landmark paper first and read it, because it will describe its novel contributions in depth, and because one can usually use that knowledge to infer everything between it and the latest paper. 

Otherwise, I end up spending too much time beating my head against a wall to decipher words I don't understand.