If you're interested in academic papers, look at the top 2-3 conferences in each field (e.g. VLDB/SIGMOD for databases, SOSP/OSDI/USENIX ATC/EuroSys/NSDI/PODC(more theoretical) for systems/distributed systems. Some of the above might require an ACM digital library subscription to see the papers (which is really good value in my opinion), but others are completely free (i.e. the USENIX conferences). In many/most cases you can often find a copy of the paper online on the author's website.