My usual approach: find any recent academic book on the topic, read the introduction/preface and maybe first chapter, and it’ll name-drop all the most important

My usual approach: find any recent academic book on the topic, read the introduction/preface and maybe first chapter, and it’ll name-drop all the most important books and papers on the subject. Usually the Web, including Wikipedia, and outside of perhaps Library Genesis, is shockingly shallow and out-of-date. It’s usually not even capable of providing a basic list of major works like this, let alone the contents, unless you stumble on some academic’s page that happens to provide it, which is increasingly hard to do through search.