For most academics, it is professionally vital to stay current in our fields. However, the volume of publication appears to be increasing exponentially [1, 2]. The first of these studies estimates a doubling time of 15 years.
What are good strategies for coping with this increasing volume of literature?
There is absolutely no need to keep up with the majority of review papers. Many of these are low-quality CV padding, especially when published in journals with very low acceptance thresholds.
I would seek out more authoritative reviews in selective journals or by particular influential individuals in your subfield.
If you are alone in your pursuit, then you can read the abstracts and, based on that, prioritize the papers into, say, three bins according to their importance to you. Work on Bin-1 primarily and let the others slide until you have time.
If you are part of a group, or can form one, you can distribute/assign the papers to members and have regular meetings featuring short reports on what each member has learned from their papers. You can use these reports, also, to distribute to bins for reading yourself. Each member will be responsible for only a few of the papers.
You can also "bin" the papers prior to distribution if you have time to read the abstracts, or even the titles, which give some idea of relevance.
In a group, people might even "bid" on papers they want to read and report on. One conference review scheme (in CS, Software Patterns) lets reviewers bid on papers, but the review process is completely different there. (https://hillside.net/patterns/about-patterns)
And note that the "broader" your field, the harder the problem, and conversely, for narrow fields.
Fifteen years ago, I did try to read at least the abstract of every new paper relevant to my work, but you're right -- it's no longer really possible. Now I rely on Google Scholar alerts, colleagues who bring to my attention new papers that they found particularly important, students working with me, who read the literature on their narrower topics more closely, and my knowledge of the key players in the field and where they publish if they have important new results.
It helps to think of all published literature as an encyclopaedia rather than a novel. You don't read an encyclopaedia, you keep it handy to look up things you need. It's not just the rate of publication that's increasing, the tools for searching that database of publications are also improving. When you do research, you want to find specific answers, look up a particular result, or check if something has been done before. You do not need to actually read or remember things that much. It can still be helpful to open the encyclopedia to a random page and read an article or two just out of curiosity and to broaden your horizons, but that's optional. It is much more important to have access to these publications than to have actually read them. It's the concept of "antilibrary" coined by Nassim Taleb:
Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.
I'm coming from the viewpoint of a mathematician, but it seems to me like you need to specialize further. Instead of studying classic Hodgkin lymphoma, you study how metastases of Hodgkin lymphoma with mutation X in gene ace1d2 in the liver affect the ability of the liver to metabolize acetominophen while patients are being treated with chemotherapy drug Z. You restrict your reading primarily to that subsubsubsubsubfield and also look at connections to one or two other equally specialized area.
Then you rely on all the other people studying the same thing to point you to fruitful connections to other areas - after they've tried them and found them fruitful.
Yes this means you can miss out on some potential insights coming from connecting different areas, but you actually have time to really understand the specific area you're studying.
