People differ, fields differ. I am a professional scientist too, when I go for a deep dive into a topic, I read 5-6 papers a day and take notes.

I stopped reading comics and started to just read interesting papers from adjacent fields a few years ago. Nature and Science are nice examples, most people I know treat these as entertainment magazines ( unless of course they get a paper in, than it’s the ist important thing ever).

Quality of publications varies a lot, but PNAS, Cell, IEEE are usually good sources and as long as one avoids purely computational studies one is usually on the safe side. Few people fake their experimental dat.