We have a book list here, but we don't have a list of must read journal articles. While a book will clearly give more depth journal articles are shorter and more available to people who have less free time or access to a quality library. I live in a small town and don't have convenient access to a good public library, but I can still access websites that provide journal articles through the university I attend. Please provide a list of must-read journal articles that are available to the public or people who have access to university subscriptions below.
Here are some past answers and discussion along similar lines:
Key:
c = comments
dy = days old
wk = weeks old
mo = months old
yr = years old
Answers
[143 c | 1 mo] What JSTOR essays should I download before I leave university and lose access?
[119 c | 2 yr] My JSTOR account runs out soon - what articles do you suggest I should download before I lose access?
[13 c | 3 yr] What are r/AskHistorian's favorite journal articles?
[15 c | 3 yr] Let's be positive: What is the best academic article you have ever read? - Includes many books
[5 c | 1 yr] Must-read Jstor articles in Intellectual History
Similar Proposals
[36 c | 1 yr] Should we include a Journal Article List in conjunction with a Book List?
[45 c | 2 yr] I think I just had a great idea: PDF Thursdays, for brilliant review papers and articles on the topic of your interest.
Misc
Journal articles will tend to be quite specific. Did you have a particular issue or question in mind?
To elaborate, the FAQ is designed to offer broad answers to broad questions (Why did WW1 erupt?). Journal articles are naturally more specific and thus a list of must-have articles would be... More difficult to provide.
There are some often cited articles in the hard sciences that are considered seminal and foundational works... I imagine the articles for this subreddit would depend on the subject matter more than insert crucial chemical engineering foundation article.
When I get home I could dig up some of more cited articles on Byzantine history and a few other topics.
It might even be worth a shot to simply search for the most cited articles on a specific issue and use them as your must-reads. Naturally, this may not be an ideal approach.
As much as I would love it and have fought for it the last time it was proposed, a journal list would truly become too unwieldy. Even if you were able to break it down by time period or region the list would still be staggering.
Google Scholar and Academia.edu can be your friends, as well.
For Alaska, one of the key articles is Richard Welch's "American Public Opinion and the Purchase of Russian America" in American Slavic and East European Review 17 (1958): 481-94.
That's the article that definitively debunked the idea that "Seward's Folly" was used as a widespread term contemporaneously to the Alaska Purchase, and in fact most people supported the purchase. It touches on why the myth became commonplace and breaks that down as well. It's 57 years old, but it's still awesome.
Give us a general topic you're interested in, and then just post a question "What are some interesting journal articles about [x]?"
As other have said, I'm afraid that a journal list would become unwieldy, as most journal articles are frightfully specific.
For law, the best journal article I've ever read is then-Judge Scalia's piece The Doctrine of Standing as an Essential Element of the Separation of Powers. It's Scalia at his finest -- intellectually rigorous, apolitical, doctrinal. The article reads as a crash course on the limited function of the federal courts in the federal system, and it's a philosophy Scalia put into practice once on the Supreme Court.
It's also publicly available here.
There are definitely a couple of "Great Articles" out there, most of which I cannot think of, of course. Two that I know were very influential and helped to revise their field was E.P. Thompson's "Time, Work-Discipline, and Indistrial Capitalism" and Peter Brown's "The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity" is another. Joan Scott's "Gender: A Useful Category for Historical Analysis" was pretty seminal in gender history. Clifford Geertz' "Balinese Cockfight" article is super-famous for anthropology but also commonly referenced in history.
There's a start. Of course, most of these are outside my field of interest (medieval) so I can't exactly tell you why they're so important, but they were articles I was forced to read in my general historiographic research as an undergrad and early MA student. I was told that they're famous.
It's been a while since I've been on JSTOR but it used to have Robert Darnton's "The Great Cat Massacre" it's fascinating and a brilliant example of cultural history
Be warned that a lot of the stuff that's on JSTOR tends to be a little older. The more current stuff doesn't necessarily make it up there. You might want to check Springer, Muse or T&F (and surely others).
JSTOR is good for getting older works, but I almost never find anything current on there.
I'm not super familiar with JSTOR, but the databases I used all had the ability to sort by times cited; this is a good way to find articles that are considered foundational or revolutionary, at the expense of being weighted towards older works. It also can over-emphasize a single article that is the only one tackling a relatively unexplored area of inquiry, so be aware that not everything is going to be great, but it is a good way to at least browse and fill in the gaps of the other recommendations here.