For scientists, especially those at the beginning of their academic career (e.g., graduate students), it is important to keep steady pace with the new ideas, new papers. When you look through the content of the issues of journals, you will have a general idea about what is the most popular research topic in your field. This is very helpful for our own research. However, how to track new papers effectively? Are you still using your email to receive alerts? In the attachment of this post, I briefly introduced how to do this by Google Reader. For me, more than three years’ experiences told me that this is a very good and effective way to do this job. Hope this will be helpful for you. If you have other good methods, let me know. Thanks!
By the way, you can also use Google reader to track other things like news, blogs, etc.
UPDATE: Google Reader was closed in 2013. I am so mad with Google! I used Feedly now.