Learning new topic: read literature from oldest to newest or the other way around? I need to start learning about a new research topic, I've been collecting articles for about a year now. I collected +400 articles, spanning a range of ~40 years.

I haven't had the time to read them since I was working on finishing a few papers, I'm finished now so I want to get on it.

The question is: should I start from oldest to newest, or from newest to oldest?

I can see some pros and cons in both approaches:

Oldest to newest:


Pro: it feels right, since that is the way the research actually happened.
Con: It will take me a lot of time to become acquainted with the latest developments in the field, and I am not able to start working on it until I do.


Newest to oldest:


Pro: I will quickly develop some knowledge (not in depth though) into the actual state of the field. This allows me to start working, at least on minor things.
Pro: It will alert me of wrong paths taken previously in the field, so when I find them in the older literature I'll be already aware.
Con: It will be considerably more difficult to follow, specially at first, since I'll be diving into the analysis of the latest developments of an unknown field.
Con: I'll necessarily be jumping back to older literature anyway, risking going down the rabbit hole of research.
Neither.

First, identify the "important" subset of your 400+ papers and read those. Second, try to identify the "good" subset of the papers and read those. Then, (if at all) read the other papers; perhaps you are doing all this with the intention of writing a review, in which case it makes sense to read oldest-to-newest to get a sense of the history.

The most obvious metrics which you can subsitute for "importance" are number of citations (these will likely include review articles) and the ranking (pick one) of the journal of publication. Note that "important" does not mean "good", "honest", "well-written", "reproducible", etc.

For a second sweep, focus more on what you actually do consider to be "good", based on authors and journals that you have found to be of consistent quality.