I consider that there are 4 levels of scientific writing.
1) news articles/lay press - basically terrible and typically get things wrong
2) scientific lay press (scientific american, discover, science news) - get things right, but generally no data/citations or nuance
3) journal summaries - get things right, citations and data for everything. Good summary of the latest scientific thought on a topic. Tend to push a point of view, which generally will be right, but that educated people can debate. Dont always show the data, but at least refer to it. These help you to get up to speed with the primary experiments that were used to establish current thinking.
4) first source articles - typically make claims too broad for the actual results. But has all data. Often times the claims don't follow from the data at all. Generally have to work in the field to understand strengths and weaknesses of methods and you cant just take the conclusions at face value.
As a PhD student, I used #3 a lot to get centered on a space. To understand 4, I typically had to learn directly from my research advisor or other grad students that specialized in an area.
My point here is that you can find these summary articles in journals (microbiology, immunology,virology etc). They are published infrequently so can be hard to find, but they exist and you should look for them.
I was shoulder deep in primary source material (#4) on real-time fuzzy search and wasn’t able to make heads or tails of where everything fit. Until I found a #3 overview that referenced most of the primary sources and put them in context. That paper was worth its weight in gold!
Do you have any tips for how to quickly find these #3 materials in other spaces?
The name for what you and the parent described is a review paper. I can't speak for Math or CS, but in life sciences the following techniques would work:
1. Search X and sort by citation count. High quality review papers get cited A LOT, typically in introduction sections of primary research papers. Alternatively, google "[X] review" or "best review paper on X".
2. Look for review journals. Many fields will have journals who only publish reviews. Nature has several such publications for example.
3. Look for the top journals in the space (start by sorting by impact factor) and see if they have review sections. If they do, try to search those sections. Most journals will reach out to top labs in a space and request that they write a review on a subject if the journal editors feel one is needed.
4. Ask someone in the field. Any researcher should be able to immediately point you to canonical reviews in their space.
For something between 2 and 4, the best I can come up with would be textbooks or seminars, both being extremely spotty in terms of quality and understandability.
In any case, a big problem you get is a cliff of information content going from 4 down to whatever the next step is. The incentive structure substantially motivates putting out new material, which must have some novel concepts. The focus on novelty and accomplishment leads to quite a mess. People put out half-baked work to be the first to write on a particular subject, which gets citations, which means the next round, also half-baked, is built on a half-baked foundation. When what's most needed in almost all cases is to parse the last generation of literature into something coherent, real, and replicable.
I suppose OP meant "review" or "survey" articles.If that was the case I totally agree.
For the other poster one nice source is of course The Annual Review journals. Arxiv of course too. The bibliographies in undergraduate/beginning graduate textbooks or syllabi are good sources too.
1) news articles/lay press - basically terrible and typically get things wrong
2) scientific lay press (scientific american, discover, science news) - get things right, but generally no data/citations or nuance
3) journal summaries - get things right, citations and data for everything. Good summary of the latest scientific thought on a topic. Tend to push a point of view, which generally will be right, but that educated people can debate. Dont always show the data, but at least refer to it. These help you to get up to speed with the primary experiments that were used to establish current thinking.
4) first source articles - typically make claims too broad for the actual results. But has all data. Often times the claims don't follow from the data at all. Generally have to work in the field to understand strengths and weaknesses of methods and you cant just take the conclusions at face value.
As a PhD student, I used #3 a lot to get centered on a space. To understand 4, I typically had to learn directly from my research advisor or other grad students that specialized in an area.
My point here is that you can find these summary articles in journals (microbiology, immunology,virology etc). They are published infrequently so can be hard to find, but they exist and you should look for them.