Introduction

Usually, this kind of topic requires a section about why, explaining the importance of the issue in the title. However, since you are reading this series, I assume that you all know the importance of keeping up-to-date with the latest development in your field. Therefore, I will skip this part and cut straight into how. In the digital era, there are three major ways to be always in line with the frontier of your field, regardless of your specialization. These three ways are Google Scholar Alert, Mail Alert, and RSS feed. I use these three methods at the same time. In the following sections, I will briefly introduce how I use them.

Google Scholar Alert

It is an easy task to make google scholar your personal "academic sentinel", which always keeps a vigilant eye on any new development relevant to the keywords you specify. With three simple steps, your academic sentinel will faithfully send the information you need to the email address you tell it. First, call out the left sidebar of Google Scholar and click on Alert.

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Second, click on CREAT ALERT on the new page.

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Then you are required to enter your "alert query" and your email address. All the Google Scholar search syntax are applicable here. For example, if you want to receive the latest publication of a specific author, you enter author: 'author name'; if you want to receive the latest publication whose title contains certain words, you enter intitle: "your search words". Once you are done, click on the CREATE ALERT button and then your sentinel will set off to work.

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Alternatively, you can just search something in Google Scholar's main interface and then save this query as an alert.

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Email Alert

I know the subsection title may be a little confusing here because Google Scholar Alert is also sent by email. Here by Email Alert I refer to the alert service offerred by the academic journals. In every field, there are some journals that one cannot afford to lose touch with. Instead of constantly checking the lastest issue in the database bought by the school or the websites of those journals, we can simply sign up to their email alert service.

RSS feed

The third way to keep up-to-date with the latest development in your field is to use RSS feed program. For thise purpose, I recommend feedly.com. You can use its service directly from the webpage and it looks like this:

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Many of the journals can be directly added by searching them in the search box. When your search returns no result, you can go to the webpage of the journal to check whether it offers an RSS TOC URL (see image below). Pasting that URL into the search box usually works. Note that not every journal offers RSS TOC. This is why we need the other two methods.

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Conclusion

There are many other ways to keep updated of the latest research, such as following the Twitter of your favorite author or topic and using the recommendation function offered by some reference management program. Some fields may have their own unique tools for doing this. The reason that I introduce the above three in this short post is that they work for everyone no matter which field you are in. This being said, if you have a good tool or workflow regarding this issue, please do not hesitate to share with us and our readers. Looking forward to your recommendation.

May the Efficiency be with you!