Which open mechanisms exist to provide an overview on a given topic?

Question

If you are new to a research subfield or want to brush up or zoom in or out, it is often hard to get a good overview. Which open tools/ platforms/ etc. exist in this space?

Answer 1

I often find academic research-level Q&A communities rather helpful when looking for an introduction to or an overview concerning a new topic. However, I only know such communities concerning a limite number of research fields such as

• MathOverflow for mathematics: https://mathoverflow.net/
• Theoretical Computer Science for computer science: https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/
• PhysicsOverflow for Physics: https://www.physicsoverflow.org/

Disclosure: I am among the founders of PhysicsOverflow

Answer 2

A clustering search engine can help you group search results in areas you don't know well. So I would suggest you try Open Knowledge Maps which by default uses the Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE) in the background and clusters the publications that match your query.

Disclosure: I am involved in running BASE.

Comments

Yes, Open Knowledge Maps is one of the two platforms I had in mind when posting the question. I did not want to pull the discussion in a particular direction, though, so decided not to mention them. The other one I had in mind was Wikidata, and especially frontends to it, like
https://tools.wmflabs.org/reasonator/?q=Q202864&lang=en
https://tools.wmflabs.org/sqid/#/view?id=Q202864&lang=en
https://tools.wmflabs.org/scholia/topic/Q202864
http://wikigenomes.org/