I'm not quite sure what's meant by "scholary papers", but I really enjoy(ed) Fielding's Ph.d thesis on "REST":<p><a href="http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm</a><p>Mostly because, it's not actually about just REST, but the way he derives REST as a reasonable approach to architect hypermedia/hypertext "applications" (In quotes, because, he's not really talking about "web apps" -- he mentions some other patterns that <i>do</i> describe "web apps" though).<p>I have the impression few people read and understood his paper, and run around with REST like others run around with MVC. Which brings us to:<p>Trygve M. H. Reenskaug's "MVC" (neé Model-View-Controller-User): <a href="http://heim.ifi.uio.no/~trygver/themes/mvc/mvc-index.html" rel="nofollow">http://heim.ifi.uio.no/~trygver/themes/mvc/mvc-index.html</a><p>and, newer, less known: "DCI - A new Role Based Paradigm for specifying collaborating objects":<p><a href="http://heim.ifi.uio.no/~trygver/themes/babyide/babyide-index.html" rel="nofollow">http://heim.ifi.uio.no/~trygver/themes/babyide/babyide-index...</a><p>I think that sums up the "papers" I generally refer back to, and find myself frustrated that so few people seem to have read and/or understood. Which leads to strange discussions and unhealthy re-inventions and "improvements".<p>Oh, I really enjoy some of the work of VPRI/Alan Kay -- but they've been rather thin on useful papers, as far as I can tell. I did enjoy a paper on Croquet's TeaTime protocol/world model -- but sadly I can't seem to find it... hang on, I think it might be this one here:<p>"Designing croquet's TeaTime: a real-time, temporal environment for active object cooperation":<p><a href="http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1094861" rel="nofollow">http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1094861</a><p>All less impressive than Shannon, Einstein, Knuth etc... but I really find those interesting.