Where would I look to find the current consensus of professionals on a given issue?

I found this question on Quora.

Here’s my answer:

A researcher finds the scientific consensus on a topic by looking at all of the published research on that topic. That’s hard for one busy layperson to do.

Instead we need to look for people who’ve already done this. I’d do a search on Google Scholar for the topic followed by the term “meta-analysis”. A meta-analysis is an article published by someone who went through all the relevant articles they could find and pulled together the work to see what trends exist.

Google Scholar lists how many times an article has been cited by others, which is helpful. It would be nice if it also listed how often the journal has been cited, which is a typical way to determine a journal’s trustworthiness.