A unified approach for finding research articles

Question

I'm a bit stymied and I'm hoping that there is likely to be an obvious solution to my problem: how can I efficiently monitor what is being published in particular areas of science?

Right now, my solution is to maintain a bunch of journal RSS feeds for sources relevant to my interests. However, this doesn't tell me much about other (possibly unknown) sources, so I supplement with 20 or so Google Scholar Alerts for existing articles, which is helpful but is overly specific.

The frustration occurs that the journals don't do a very good job of maintaining their feeds and I have feeds and alerts in different applications (I also use Papers2 to maintain my PDF library but lacks an RSS reader).

I have a hard time believing that this has not already been solved.

Answer 1

Presumably you are looking for a free source. If you have access to a pay-for database vendor (such as STN, Scifinder, Dialog etc.) then you can set up very precise alerts. I used to use the email alerting services of the journals - they were reliable, possibly more so than RSS feeds. With careful programming of a mail program such as Outlook, you could even automatically emphasize or sort into folders messages containing key words (e.g. halogenation or pyridine).