very few of us have subscriptions that allow us to peruse many scientific journals, although some have access via work or even the library. the more general journals like Science or Nature only have a few articles per issue on climate related subjects.
so where do most of us get our information from? internet news aggregators, like WUWT or SkS. even if we try to check the original sources, someone else was giving us the idea where to look.
and of course there is Google or any other search engine. I find that googling images of charts and graphs sends you in many directions because the same image is often used by people with very different viewpoints.
eg. 'global temp graph' lead me to a Lomborg article from this image-
which lead me to Nature article which inspired it. paywalled but a search of the title lead to an Arizona.edu course with a free copy (
http://www.blc.arizona.edu/courses/schaffer/182h/Climate/Overestimated Warming.pdf ) but because my browser doesnt like pulling out pdf images, I googled the first part of the caption.
pretty strong evidence that global models are overestimating warming. from a respected journal.
the google image search from the caption only brought this image up once. to an article at Whats Up With That.