I'm not even tired! I have a few papers to read and just keep finding my eyelids drooping. I'm fine with data analysis. Can read web forums till the cows come home (love that phrase...where did it come from?!) but reading papers.... nope straight to sleep. They're even quite interesting papers. Anyone else have this trouble? what do you do?

lol i had this the whole way through first year! I found that taking notes helped keep me awake, it took longer to get through the papers but at least I didn't fall asleep and it's been really handy having a big book with short notes on all my papers in it. I numbered them all too so I can find ones I need pretty easily, just flick through the book! And coffee, plenty of coffee!

Oooooh yeah, I get this really badly and have been known to fall asleep at my desk over a paper several times! Like you, I'm fine if I'm doing other things like testing participants and writing papers etc, but reading sends me straight to sleep! I just try to save it for the time of day i'm less sleepy, and occasionally swallow a couple of caffeine pills (Pro-plus) to keep me going! I'm not saying this is the best solution, but I don't drink tea or coffee so Pro-plus does help me out with the caffeine boost now and again, but I don't make a habit of it! Best, KB

Woo lunch and a cup of tea, and I read 1 paper without a doze! Now off for another cuppa to celebrate!

I did this first year too. I found that I was most likely to fall asleep between the two hours after lunch. Also, in the afternoon on a really sunny day when the sun came in and made everything so warm and cozy. zzzzzz
So it may be that certain things trigger you (food, too high of a comfort level, etc.) to get your sleep while reading papers? What I did was to have saltier lunches to raise my blood pressure some days, and then hit the coffee for other times. The other thing I did was to walk around while reading the papers from time to time. The other PhDs thought I was a bit crazy, but it helped a lot. I did notice that I had more trouble finding a comfort spot if I was taking notes more often, even notes that were irrelevant to the paper at hand.
Sweet dreams... I mean happy reading. :$