How I keep up with the literature and what I hand to people who want to ramp up on quantum information.

Where to look

• arXiv quant-ph — The default. An RSS reader plus a few tags goes a long way.
• Quantum journal — Open-access, high quality, fast-ish review.
• Google Scholar alerts — Set up alerts for authors and topics you track.
• Semantic Scholar — Useful for citation graphs and TLDRs.
• Connected Papers — Visualize a paper’s neighborhood quickly.

Textbooks I actually open

• Nielsen & Chuang, Quantum Computation and Quantum Information — the standard reference; chapters 2, 4, 8, 10 in particular.
• Wilde, Quantum Information Theory — best treatment of channel capacities and resource theories. Free preprint.
• Watrous, The Theory of Quantum Information — rigorous, math-leaning. Free PDF.
• Preskill, Caltech Ph 219 lecture notes — still excellent.
• Mermin, Quantum Computer Science — short, clear, great for new students.

Survey starting points

• Quantum error correction (Roffe, 2019)
• NISQ and beyond (Preskill, 2018)
• Variational quantum algorithms (Cerezo et al., 2021)
• Distributed quantum computing (Caleffi et al., 2022)

Stub — drop personal “papers I keep recommending” here as the list grows.