What tools do you use for researching new fields?

> a new academic area

Research papers and books then. I use Google Scholar for searching, and libgen / scihub for the stuff I can't get access to easily.

> I inevitably lose track of papers.

A tools I used in graduate school for keeping track of research papers (and books): Zotero (https://www.zotero.org/).

> I'm curious if there are already tools out there to aggegate open access research by your own criteria (i.e. from specific sources only, prioritise by keyword)?

University Libraries seem to do this; And to a lesser extent smaller libraries associated with communities. Some software that I know of that was related to how my library did things is EZproxy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EZproxy). It manages access to journals and databases, which is at least a part of how to address this point. Otherwise, I'm not aware of a service that does this; Though I will keep an eye on the thread just in case someone else has a good recommendation.

I don’t perceive YouTube and social networks as mass media, but since print publications are either absent or write nonsense that is not interesting to me (usually it’s simple chatter about the coolness of Python and GPT chat, or about how difficult it is to be an IT specialist, it’s all sad and boring). I read old magazines that could not be subscribed to, because at the time of my formation as a specialist I did not have the funds for such things. Little has changed since then. In addition, I am interested in the web design of that time, and I try to adapt my work to both old and new browsers, and so that the appearance is not as boring as modern landing pages with ultra standard content, every second one copies the first one. the best time was when coding was clean, pure script without frameworks and several languages at the same time, simplicity and transparency. optimization, and every byte counts.

You should read review papers. There are journals that either only publish such papers (e.g. Review of Modern Physics) or some of the larger journals sometimes publish such papers (e.g. Science or Nature). They are usually written by one or more experts in the given field, are less dense than normal papers and focus on the current state of the art and future research directions, so they're pretty much exactly what you want. They will also contain tons of references to relevant work. Arxiv is just an unfiltered stream of mostly garbage (pardon me) so unless you're already familiar with a field and know how to filter out such garbage it's pretty useless I'd say.

Usually just Google and YouTube. I’ll use free resources and if I want to sharpen a particular skill further than free resources are available for, I’ll find a decent premium course.

ssrn/arxiv/etc. I try to look for paper review style papers so I can get up to speed on the "latest amalgamation of research"

Youtube and Google search.