CiteseerX is fantastic. Once you find a good paper or two (and/or the academic literature's relevant buzzwords for your issue), you can span out through the ci

CiteseerX is fantastic. Once you find a good paper or two (and/or the academic literature's relevant buzzwords for your issue), you can span out through the citations for quite a while. "Introduction / Survey of ..." papers (e.g. http://archives.cs.iastate.edu/documents/disk0/00/00/02/04/00000204-01/TR93-01c.pdf http://archives.cs.iastate.edu/documents/disk0/00/00/02/04/0...) exist mainly for the bibliography. Also, when you find someone whose name keeps coming up, look for their faculty page, e.g. Andrew Appel's (http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/papers/ http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/papers/). For papers that don't have .pdf or .ps files cached on Citeseer (due to primary hosting behind the ACM's paywall) try searching on Google Scholar and clicking "X other versions". Typically, the ACM is the first result, but faculty pages have publicly visible copies.