How to locate most important literature in an unfamiliar area I'm a pre-doctoral researcher (does it exist?) figuring out my true interests and learning the craft. When I start exploring a new (that is, unfamiliar) area, I try to find the most influential literature and scholars in that area through a haphazard and unsystematic process (such as starting with some highly-cited papers, consulting their list of references etc.). And because this is an unsystematic process, I'm never sure that I've not left unexplored some really important work. 

I wonder if there's a more efficient process. How do you all go about this?

Also, (and this is a more specific question) what are some online forums where I can ask for more experienced researchers' opinion about what they consider to be the most important literature in a particular area?

Edit: To add some context, I work as a researcher in a US business school. My main area of work is entrepreneurship. Since this is an interdisciplinary subject, I have to consult literature in a wide variety of fields (some recent examples: psychology, complexity science, economics; of course, I access a very small part, the part that is the most relevant to my question). Entrepreneurship itself is in the process of defining its own scope and boundary.
The process you are currently using was the basis of my process. Unfortunately, I do not know of any real systemic way. I always found important papers way later that were disconnected to the main body of work. 

Here is what I did, using the Papers app (for Mac), but subsitute any paper repo of your choice:


Find the top few highest cited papers in this area; usually these
can be found easily or from pointers from others
Scan the references of these papers to find papers they cite in
common or papers with titles that look very relevent; these are likely prior works that are also relevant
Use Google Scholar to find highly cited papers that cited the
papers found in 1
Repeat 2 on those references list


...
stop when exhausted.