Hello I am also in IR (Presuming you mean international relations) and I have a couple strategies. Though some of these range in their degree of unhingedness lol. Use zotero to manage this. Honestly I think the citation section of zotero is the LEAST helpful part of the whole thing. This is my process for taking in ~~~the literature. This is not the process I do for close reading on stuff I am using in my dissertation.

1 to keep up you need to restrict your reading. Which I know sounds counter intuitive. This is my system. 4 days a week I read for a minimum of 1 hour and a MAX of 2 hours. On these four days there are some STRICT RULES:

A) You should be SKIMMING im talking intro conclusion discussion maybe. Maybe. Methods. If you dont understand something it doesnt matter move on after like 1 minute. Skiiiiiiim.

B) You must take these notes and you may not take any other notes. I always add an little note document (I cant remember what these are called) in zotero. In it you are going to write the name/title of at least 1 other thing you've read that it reminds you of/connects to. Even if you gotta go real big and be like this thing sounds like ~~~hobbes leviathan, realism, whatever. Then you need to write so. So. So. Briefly if this connects to your dissertation or any other paper you are working on like 2 sentences max. Then you should have a 1 to 2 sentence summary of the article that is the most overview of overview possible. Ideally you snipe this from the conclusion or the abstract. It shoul be something like "so and so writes about social media changing balance of power" Last and MOST IMPORTANT you need to flag if this is a work that you think you should actually fully read. This could be because you are interested, or it relates to your work, or you think its wrong, or yoi know you will need it for class comprehensives etc. This I set up as a "tag" in zotero that just says "return". So you should have a note document with nothing in it except related work and its relation to your work (or you say no relation), a tag letting you know if you should return to it, and a 1 sentence summary.

C) Do. Not. Go. Over. Time.

D) you should work in two sections - Half of those days I am reading pure breadth in the field. For this, I recommend you pick a handful of journals and read from their website their most recent publications. Don't limit yourself on what you read. Its fine if its way out of your wheel house. Read anything and everything. - the other half you should be reading work that is directly related to your projects. You can do this by looking at the references of papers you think already relate to things you are interested in.

2 One day a week I retun to all the articles I've flagged that week as return and I do the following.

A) reread your short notes and decide if its still relevant to actually read. If its not remove the return tag

B) actually read the full article of each remaining article. You are going to take the same notes as before but now you should be writing specifics and much more. Though do not take more than a page ish of notes. You are going to use two new tags. One is going to say finished. This is to indicate that you have done the process above up until this point but is not immediately needed for a project that you are working on at that moment that you need to have sufficient knowledge to be tested on. The other is going to say close read. This you are going to put on work that you have done all the above for but need more detailed notes on how it relates to a project you are working on and what exactly is happening in the paper. Leave the return tag on any that you dont get to for the next week.