[solardev]

Sometimes a lazy shortcut is to read the metastudies instead. That's other researchers aggregating papers on a particular topic and seeing if they statistically agree with each other after normalization of some sort.

You lose a lot of nuance that way, but if you're researching a general topic that's not super niche, it can be a helpful overview.

That's also not for groundbreaking research since it usually takes years, but very little in science is groundbreaking like that anyway, and I doubt a layperson would be able to recognize the true breakthroughs on their own.