Another trick: use google scholar or a similar citation graph.
Unfortunately the citation graph sites won’t show all the outgoing references from a particular paper (I assume because they’re afraid of copyright issues?) but looking at the incoming references for a paper can be very useful. If you can find an old classic paper in some subject, then most major later papers will have cited it, so you can start from google scholar search’s list of references to the classic paper, which will be sorted by citation count. Doing keyword searches within such a list of references can often quickly surface the most important papers on a subject, especially if you go a couple hops into the “cited by” graph. Often among the most-cited papers is some kind of review paper with a clear explanation of the context, overview of the literature, and extended definitions of important terms.
Unfortunately the citation graph sites won’t show all the outgoing references from a particular paper (I assume because they’re afraid of copyright issues?) but looking at the incoming references for a paper can be very useful. If you can find an old classic paper in some subject, then most major later papers will have cited it, so you can start from google scholar search’s list of references to the classic paper, which will be sorted by citation count. Doing keyword searches within such a list of references can often quickly surface the most important papers on a subject, especially if you go a couple hops into the “cited by” graph. Often among the most-cited papers is some kind of review paper with a clear explanation of the context, overview of the literature, and extended definitions of important terms.