Right now I just rely on a couple of journal subscriptions + Google Scholar alerts, but it always feels like I’m missing stuff. New work pops up on Twitter or conference talks and I realize I had no idea it even came out. Do you all have a system that actually works? Daily site checks, RSS feeds, lab mailing lists… or is it just a constant scramble?
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I only keep up to date on the research questions that I’m interested in. I don’t aim to grok an entire research area.
Math has arxiv.org for preprints. It provides a daily email of the titles and abstracts of the field you’re interested in. Read it with your morning coffee. Most papers are put up there first regardless of journal. I don’t know if that is the case in other fields.
I don’t. It has become impossible. I can only read so much.
A couple of people I know from the field or who I met at conferences are listed in ResearchGate, giving me updates from their work.
Simple answer is, I don’t.
Become an editor than you have to stay up to date, assessing new research every week
You will never be totally up to date. I find journal reviewing helps me in this area. Just do your best and be selective about what you want to be current in.
Twitter (worse than it used to be, but I’ll open it up every once in awhile), LinkedIn (better than it used to be, but still only a subset of the publishing population), and PubMed or Google searching of the various questions that arise in any given day.
I also try to attend at least one in-person conference every year and go to some of the journal clubs, research seminars, workshops, and other events at my institution. My colleagues and I also email particularly interesting papers to each other or post them to our Teams channels. If there’s an interesting nugget cited in a paper I am reading, I’ll read the source from the references too.
You can use your google scholar account to set alerts, and I made some fairy specific ones. You can add and subtract things, such as “topic 1” + “topic 2,” which will only return articles where these topics overlap. I maybe read 10% of the articles max, but it helps me keep up by at least skimming headlines
I’m in the humanities, and things don’t move as fast as the sciences or technology areas do. Aside from journal publications, I’ve got a strong social media network that promotes our/new work, and I go out of my way to check the cited works of new books to see if there’s anything I might have missed.
Having done the deep dives of my area of focus, I also have a sense of who is worth reading and who isn’t, so I tend to also use Google Alerts for the more prolific ones.
Finally, conference discussions are a great place to catch up on what you may have missed (or help others who may have missed what you clocked).
Not that much will be relevant to you let alone important. From time to time check it out.