[jacobolus]

The most useful tool is the academic citation graph, e.g. via Google Scholar.

Start with a couple keywords. Click through the "cited by n" links on the top few papers. For papers that don’t have PDFs freely available, find DOIs and put them into Sci-hub. Books can often be found at the Internet Archive, Google Books, or libgen. At the start, skim skim skim.

Look at what links forward and backward from the papers you see. Hunt for new keywords to try. Go a few hops all around the graph. It often doesn’t take too long to get a rough lay of the land.

[stevenjgarner]

Academic citation graphs are invaluable WHERE the topic is academic, but this post (like most citations I would venture to say) is an example of citing Wikipedia that would generally not be considered academic or in the results of the articles and case law of scholar.google.com.

There is a huge body of knowledge that lies (dare I say) in a Google search. You just need to know how to evaluate the search results with a reasonable criteria of notability, relevance, accuracy, etc.

[corrral]

Thanks for the reminder—I often forget about Google's various less-prominent tools and services.