If you're really in a hurry, filter out all those not published at top venues (e.g. ICSE or FSE as top tier for SW engineering, or ASE/ISSTA the tier below), or

If you're really in a hurry, filter out all those not published at top venues (e.g. ICSE or FSE as top tier for SW engineering, or ASE/ISSTA the tier below), or at the very least cited by several papers at top venues. In the vast majority of cases everything else is likely to be noise, incremental, or preliminary work. Of course consider the above venues as (perhaps) necessary but not necessarily sufficient condition for quality. You have to realise that academia is hyper competitive. The best work tends to get published at top venues because they are very difficult to get published at, and offer hiring and promotion committees an easy filter. Use that in your favour to filter out much of the dross and/or poorly executed ideas.