[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.