How to broadly assess the state of research for a topic? This is coming from a non-PhD, please help me out:
If I have a broad interest in a topic, and I want to assess what are the current (in the last 5 years I guess) high-impact research done in said topic, where are the places I should look, and some general tips on how to search?
Eg: say I'm interested in application of AI/ML in education, or what are the key factors impacting engagement in MOOCs, for instance. What search engines should I try, and any tips on how to search? I'm specifically asking about scientific research searching and overview, not general articles. If this can't be answered in general I can also try to provide some specific fields of interest.
Many thanks.
You can use any academic search engines such as Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic, or LENS (these three are freely available) or scientific databases such as Web of Science, Scopus, or Dimensions (these three require an [institutional] access for full use) and limit the time range of publications to the past years.
You could also add the word 'review' or 'survey' to your query, or, better yet, limit the search results to the document type 'Review' in order to specifically fetch articles that serve as reviews of a given research field.