What is the best approach to get up to speed with academic research?

Question

Long story short, been quite burned out after several years in the industry and been struggling to find a position in another company with a similar role/responsibilities.I now have the opportunity to spend some time back in academia. The workload seems very manageable and I was thinking to take the opportunity to publish/patent and grow before jumping back in the rat race.I kept myself informed, reading few papers from time to time but definitely not enough.I was wondering, what's the best approach to get up to speed with the hot topics in my community?I was thinking something like, let's get through the proceedings of the top 3 conferences/journals of 2022/2021, select a shortlist of promising papers (this can be tricky this selection itself could be biased by my judgement) and start from those to backtrack on the references.Does it make sense? Any recommendation on how to optimize these efforts?

sargstuff · Accepted Answer

Ideally, align/pursue things relevant to academia group spending time with. Rest of answers or where to look for answer should follow.
Much more difficult if in situation where academia group doesn't align/match up with where/what want to do.
concept: Philosopy major working in English department doing academic research to write physics papers.
vs. Philosopy major working at MIT multimedia lab. on ways to program kenetics