Well, the number of citations combined with paper's age is also a decent indicator if it's relevant to first read..
I usually stick the most cited papers when first reading up a subject, look at their authors recent work and references and their authors, and go from there.
There is little point in trying to go through a paper like this, let alone paying full price for it.
I think @exe is right; IEEE is not going to rescue everything. They may have layout standards and such, but I've also seen some pretty horrific papers (both in grammar and content itself), and I've only been in academia for a fairly short time..