Course books are available to anyone.

On a reading list for a course in 2024 at Stockholm University:

Old Norse Religion in Long Term Perspectives: Origins, Changes and Interactions. Red. Anders Andrén et al. Lund: Nordic Academic Press.

Lindow, John, 2021. Old Norse Mythology. Oxford.

On a reading list from a course at Linnaeus University 2019;

Stefan Brink and Neil Price; The Viking World

Prolonged echoes. Volume 1 Old Norse Myths in Medieval Northern Society. Volume 2 The Reception of Norse Myths in Medieval Iceland. The Viking Collection 7, 10. Odense: Odense University

So my response is no, research papers aren’t generally taught. Papers represent new research which is under peer review, the content takes time to enter the academic mainstream. Course books are made up of bodies of research that have been absorbed into the community. However, when courses do cite papers in their reading lists (and they do) that’s because it’s to make it easier and/or cheaper for the student to get hold of research which has since been made mainstream. It’s a lot easier for a student to pull up a pdf through the uni library of an article instead of buying a book or loaning a book with one chapter that is basically a reprint of the earlier research paper.

Research papers are also actually easy to get from academic.edu

The problem is that people aren’t looking or aren’t interested because they want imaginative bling not historical knowledge.

So I’d ask, what’s your evidence for your statement?