The author sometimes forget to mention what B actually is, changes the meaning of the multiplication operator implicitly, assumes the formula given is inside an integral.... I could go on.
A maths article is an article. A lot are imperfect, quite a few are bad. Some times it is not the reader that is lacking.
That being said, do your homeworks and only consider that possibility after giving the article one hour of your time or so.
Would anybody be able to provide the blog post I believe we both read, which says almost exactly what Iv wrote? I could have sworn Michael Nielson wrote it, but I was unable to produce it last time I searched. So I am following OP's advice and am asking here. :P
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=666615
In particular, this piece of advice he gives still rings true to my ears:
Often, when struggling with a book or paper, it's not you that's the problem, it's the author. Finding another source can quickly clear stuff up.
Short of bugging the author, you can also go to Wikipedia's entry for SciHub and see what their latest known domain suffix and/or IP address is.
Or, go directly to arxiv, scihub or a similar service.
Fully agree with the following steps, though.
All of this just to have the paper. During reading, you still need to check the Russian original and ask a Russian friend (as Google translator is not necessarily to be trusted on mathematical texts) for some points that make no sense and turn out to be mistranslations. Not to mention the references to other Russian papers from the sixties that could be even more difficult to find.
On the other hand I have to mention that the paper actually contained the theorem I wanted and the proof was reasonably clear. The author also replied helpfully to an email I sent him! So this was definitely worth the effort. I was lucky!
You can replace all that by a trip to sci-hub ;)
The trick is to find out the IP address of a DNS server or two that knows about Sci-Hub, and put those in your /etc/resolv.conf file.
Note: They have to come first in the file, before any 'compromised' DNS servers like Google's or your ISP's, that will always report 'sorry, I don't know how to find this "Sci-Hub" you speak of'.
If you're on a Windows machine, do it in Control Panel instead; dig down in Network settings, TCP/IP, Advanced, DNS to find the place to type in new DNS server IP addresses.
Do that, and Sci-Hub works fine. Twitter is a good place to find the latest working IP addresses for their DNS server. Last time I looked, they were 80.82.77.83 and 80.82.77.84.
First you want to see if this paper is even worth reading. Scan the Abstract and the conclusions. If it is still relevant then do a quick scan of the whole text and look for the things you don't understand. For everything you don't understand look up on wikipedia. Once you have found those pages then look on the citations on wikipedia to gain more understanding. If you still can't understand the paper reread it and then attempt to redo their calculations. If all else fails ask someone to help you read it. Whenever you get confused write on the paper questions. If you figure out that this paper is meaningless then look for another one.
If you figure out a new question that you want to persue more then try to answer that question. If you don't have access to professor or if they are impeding your work then use stackexchange. Either that or try to invalidate your new theory yourself. Recognize that you can be wrong.