Reading the Literature

Suggested Approach

It's crucial to keep up-to-date with the academic literature. Here's a recommended approach:
Set up a Google Scholar alert for authors and keywords related to your research
Use an RSS reader app, like  Inoreader , to subscribe to specific journal RSS feeds
It's not expected (or remotely possible!) to be perfectly up-to-date on everything being published, but some active effort is better than none.

For literature searches on previously published work:
Use  Google Scholar 
Explore the literature through citation networks via tools like  Connected Papers  or  ResearchRabbit 

Remote Access

The easiest way to access journal articles off-campus:
Use the  ReadCube Papers browser extension 
Use the  GlobalProtect VPN 
Use the  Princeton University Library webpage  (best chance of success for getting access)

Recommended Journals

New journals keep appearing, so this list will surely be out-of-date soon. That said, here is an incomplete list of recommended ournals:

General science journals:
Science
Nature
Nature Communications
Science Advances
General chemistry journals:
Nature Chemistry
Journal of the American Chemical Society
Chem
ACS Central Science
Angewandte Chemie International Edition
Chemical Science
JACS Au
Computational chemistry and computational materials science:
npj Computational Materials
Digital Discovery
Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation
Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling
Materials journals:
Nature Materials
Matter
Advanced Materials
Chemistry of Materials
ACS Materials Letters
ACS Materials Au
Journal of Materials Chemistry A
Molecular Systems Design and Engineering
Catalysis journals:
Nature Catalysis
ACS Catalysis
Chem Catalysis
Catalysis Science and Technology
ChemCatChem
Journal of Catalysis
Physical chemistry journals:
Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters
Journal of Physical Chemistry C
Journal of Chemical Physics
Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics
Energy journals:
Nature Energy
Energy and Environmental Science
ACS Energy Letters
Chemical engineering journals:
Nature Chemical Engineering
Chemical Engineering Journal
ACS Engineering Au
Computation and machine learning journals:
Nature Computational Science
Nature Machine Intelligence
Machine Learning: Science and Technology
Reviews and perspectives:
Nature Reviews Materials
Chemical Reviews
Chemical Society Reviews
Trends in Chemistry
Accounts of Chemical Research
Accounts of Materials Research
Data and Software journals:
Scientific Data
Journal of Open Source Software
Pre-print servers:
ChemRxiv
arXiv