So You Wanna Be Cutting Edge

Being aware of the latest science and technology that humans are discovering and developing always provides some insight and excitement. Aside from news articles, a lot of us who aren't very close to these new developments don't hear about them until they're pretty mature or solid in their field. While we can't always be on the bleeding edge without being in those spaces, there are resources we can use to get closer than usual. This is a living post, so I'll be adding new resources as I find them.

NOTE: At the time of this writing I'm not an academic researcher, so take my rating on the quality of these resources with a small grain of salt.

Preprints

Preprints are scholarly articles that haven't yet been peer reviewed. While the lack of peer review may suggest that a paper isn't very "high quality", there are lots of amazing preprint papers.

  • Cornell arXiv (lots of fields, pronounced like "archive")
  • bioRxiv (lots of bio-related fields)
  • medRxiv (lots of bio and medicine-related fields)

Journals & Peer Reviewed Papers

Academic journals are a great way to find high quality articles. They also very often consist of peer reviewed papers.

Lots of journals restrict access to papers behind a paywall or scholarly title. Try emailing the researchers asking for a copy of the paper or look for it on Sci-Hub to read it for free.

Watching National Defense Interests

For millenia, defense and intelligence have driven forward innovation in the public and private sector. Watching what the wealthiest and most capable nations focus their interests on can provide hints into people, institutions, and areas of research that have great amounts of funding and attention.

Looking at journals in these fields or watching the research that program leaders' institutions are putting out may be insightful.

Patents

Patents are inventors' and corporations' second best testament to true innovation, right behind trade secrets. Keeping an eye on the latest patents in a field can give you a pulse on the latest devices, systems, and processes.

Catching Up

Trying to start from 0 and get to the cutting edge in a field? Of course there's stuff for that!

  • zlibrary (Free E-Book PDFs, consider paying for a copy of a book if you like it to support the author)