This is hard for everyone as nobody can consume the sum total of human knowledge. People consume knowledge which helps them develop filters. These filters then determine which further knowledge they will acquire and how they will integrate with their existing knowledge.
Everyone has blinders on, just that everyone has different blinders on. You will have blinders on as well, you just want to become smart about it. A lot of the above points help you more intelligently filter information.
While reading, keep in mind a hypothesis you want to actively investigate. Don't just read passively. Holden Karnofsky has a good article emphasising this.
It helps if the hypothesis is one you're genuinely curious about. If you're curious you'll endure more bullshit.
Sometimes the answer is just "sucking it up and deal with it". Often you might optimistically hope to understand a research field in 3 months, only to later realise you've spent 5 years on it and you're still not as much of an expert as you'd like. Deep understanding takes time to build. This is a thing that happens and is normal.
Being overwhelmed as a beginner is normal, most resources are not written with you as their target audience. Many people are not interested in going out of their way to help a beginner, they're more interested in doing a mediocre job and going home. (You should try to get help from others though, but you need to smart about it because most people don't care.)
Figure out what the primary methods of investigation of the field are. Is it surveys, is it experiments, is it theoretical reasoning? Human beings do input, processing and output, researchers included. What is the input?
Figure out the main devices and methods used in experiments in that field? For example in biotech some common methods are: observing cell count and physiology under microscope, gel electrophoresis, PCR, plasmid insertion, incubation under UV hood. If you can, try visiting a lab of your research field in person. If not, see youtube videos for each of the main equipment used.
Study how RCTs work. Study basics of probability and statistics. This comes up a lot, no matter your field. Many researchers suck at statistics so if you don't suck you'll see holes in other people's work.
Deeply study atleast one STEM field. For example, mathematics. This will help you understand both other STEM fields and non-STEM fields.
Deeply study atleast one non-STEM field. For example, psychology. This will help you understand both other STEM fields and non-STEM fields.
Ask a few people what their info filters are. Which sources of information do they pay attention to and which ones do they ignore.
Think about what research fields as a whole are doing, not just what individual researchers are trying to write about in individual papers. Where does the funding come from for the field? What is considered high status to work on? Which methods are popular to use? Which assumptions are taken for granted when working inside the field (but might not be taken for granted outside of it)?
Read about Hamming question. Identify Hamming questions in your field of research.
This is hard for everyone as nobody can consume the sum total of human knowledge. People consume knowledge which helps them develop filters. These filters then determine which further knowledge they will acquire and how they will integrate with their existing knowledge.
Everyone has blinders on, just that everyone has different blinders on. You will have blinders on as well, you just want to become smart about it. A lot of the above points help you more intelligently filter information.