Scholarship is an important virtue of rationality, but it can be costly. Its major costs are time and effort. Thus, if you can reduce the time and effort required for scholarship - if you can learn to do scholarship more efficiently - then scholarship will be worth your effort more often than it previously was.

As an autodidact who now consumes whole fields of knowledge in mere weeks, I've developed efficient habits that allow me to research topics quickly. I'll share my research habits with you now.

Review articles and textbooks are king

My first task is to find scholarly review (or 'survey') articles on my chosen topic from the past five years (the more recent, the better). A good review article provides:

An overview of the subject matter of the field and the terms being used (for scholarly googling later).
An overview of the open and solved problems in the field, and which researchers are working on them.
Pointers to the key studies that give researchers their current understanding of the topic.

If you can find a recent scholarly edited volume of review articles on the topic, then you've hit the jackpot. (Edited volumes are better than single-author volumes, because when starting out you want to avoid reading only one particular researcher's perspective.) Examples from my own research of just this year include:

Affective neuroscience: Pleasures of the Brain (2009)
Neuroeconomics: Decision Making and the Brain (2008)
Dual process theories of psychology: In Two Minds (2009)
Intuition and unconscious learning: Intuition in Judgment and Decision Making (2007)
Goals: The Psychology of Goals (2009)
Catastrophic risks: Global Catastrophic Risks (2008)

If the field is large enough, there may exist an edited 'Handbook' on the subject, which is basically just a very large scholarly edited volume of review articles. Examples: Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology (2007), Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology (2009), Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Neuroscience (2009), Handbook of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience (2008), Oxford Handbook of Neuroethics (2011), Handbook of Relationship Intitiation (2008), and Handbook of Implicit Social Cognition (2010). For the humanities, see the Blackwell Companions and Cambridge Companions.

If your questions are basic ...

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