I always say that the key to success in scientific research is to read a lot.
How to monitor the scientific literature and get notifications of the most recent progress in your area? In this post, I document my different techniques.
RSS & Emails
RSS You can monitor the RSS feeds of your favorite journals. For instance, here is an RSS feed of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/rss/TOC32.XML
- For example URLs, see academia.json
- For DBLP to RSS feeds, see dblp-rss.py
- Emails & RSS for arxiv
Email Most publishers support email notification for journals. arXiv can send you daily notifications about new papers in a given category.
Automated Alerts
Google control supports setting up alerts about new papers!
- based on a keyword for new papers
- all papers by your given researchers
- for new papers citing one paper you love (excellent criteria)
I really recommend the latter, it has a very high accuracy. If you like a paper topic, it is very likely that you will like new papers citing it.
Recommendation systems
I’m using two recommendation systems for papers.
Google Scholar: you see recommended papers in the main UI if you are logged in, and you can also receive them by email if you “Follow (somebody) >> new articles related to this author’s research”.
Semantic Scholar: can recommend articles based on your research. An additional feature of Semantic Scholar is that you can create a recommendation feed for any topic, from am initial seed list of related articles, so called list-based recommendations.
Social media
People do share papers on social media (Twitter a lot, LinkedIn a bit). If you follow the right researchers, you’ll get notified about the cool papers in your social media feed.
What I use
For giving a concrete sense of my own monitoring, as of Oct 2024, I use Google Scholar and Semantic Scholar and I follow approximately 16 journals, 18 conferences, 2 arxiv categories, 64 researchers, 141 papers citing important papers wrt my current research agenda.