[waynesonfire]

You searching arxiv.org stood out to me.

I wish I had better skills at searching academic papers for problems I'm trying to solve or that I'm just thinking about. I think just as there are some people that google better than others, I imagine a similar skill applies to academic papers. Anyone encounter this? How do I get better at it?

I thought at first it was an accessibility problem, and perhaps it still is. In that, I didn't have access to a library of academic papers. But, arxiv.org does make available a lot of content for free. The content seems to be growing too.

Another question I'm exploring is how do I decide which journals to subscribe to. I have a limited budget so have to pick wisely. What makes things difficult is that the papers that I have found interesting in the past, seemingly in a related field, are still published to various journals.

One more random comment. I really can't wait until LLMs are applied towards academic papers. Academic papers build on-top of each other and there are concepts that are considered "common knowledge" to experts and may require a long history of papers to consume to build a foundation of concepts and vocabulary. The difficulty is that recursively these papers introduce the same problem. A lot of times the concepts are not that difficult and it would be wonderful if an LLM could be used to fill the gaps as if I were talking to a expert.

I guess there are sort of expository papers that act as a checkpoint for a particular topic. I'm not sure how to find these.

[whatever1]

Unfortunately this only comes with practice and it only applies to a specific domain. A physicist cannot easily weed out computer science literature and vice versa.

In fact, there are identical problems that are solved by different communities and you would not know because they use completely different lingo. Math optimization/dynamic programming/reinforcement learning is one of these.

Many of the accomplished scientists just read papers from other domains and adapt them to their own domain making huge progress.

So yes I see tremendous value to what you describe. A Google translate for academic work that can translate between domain specific lingos and common language.

[currymj]

just use google scholar to start (which pulls from almost all journals + arxiv), and consider searching through citations as well. you can search for survey papers and look at their bibliographies too.

do NOT subscribe to any academic journals. not worth it for an individual. find a way to get access for free, such as through a local library or institution, or by other means. also note that often google scholar gives a link to a PDF over on the right, or in alternate versions of the article.

there are services like perplexity.ai that can search arxiv, pull articles, and feed them through an LLM for you -- it's pretty much what you want. some of the LLM chat interfaces let you upload PDFs too. none of this actually works that well yet but sometimes useful.