how many publications have you read in first time of your phd? and how many % have you understed from them?:)

notice 'anon' - ashamed to identify myself. In my first year I collected a whole file of papers and read about two of them. You won't understand much until you're actually DOING similar research yourself. I'm currently challenging myself to read the whole file. I did contact the author of a relevant paper once to find out their secrets and they were very helpful...

hi anon,
kind of what secrets they told you? What should we do if our experiments go wrong?

I guess you could just read the abstracts, that will get you through them quicker, and identify any really important ones.

none
people only publish rubbish I trust only my results

re: what should we do if our experiments go wrong - ask questions, loads of them, don't ever feel embarrassed about not knowing something you haven't been taught. Look outside your own research group, other departments in your uni. I also seem to have developed a knack for getting people to lend me things. If you don't ask, you don't get - I haven't ever been outright refused help. The author I contacted was so great - I had been trying for a month to get a certain technique to work and he talked me through it step by step. It turned out that there were lots of minor problems that I'd probably never have identified by myself. Look specifically for papers that deal with TECHNIQUES, METHODS, TUTORIAL type things. I'm not sure people would be so willing to share breakthrough results.