I think it depends on what you mean by advanced and what exactly you're calling engineering.

As you've pointed out in other engineering disciplines, there are researchers who are pretty deeply immersed in the academic papers and help to move the state of the art forward.

In other cases, there are the societies like ASME, IEEE, ASCE, etc. that put out standards or guidelines. These could either be viewed as documents that you use to plug numbers into formulas or you can try to derive the equations from first principles. Often there are training courses or workshops run by these societies, so that's a place to learn. There are trade publications to learn from as well.