It can be an onerous task to keep track of all the research that gets published these days. I can’t say that I am great at it either, but there are some reasonably standard Google tools that I have found useful. Back when I first started in MRI research, my supervisor had a lab meeting in which one person’s job (rotating, thankfully) was to go to the library and photocopy the Table of Contents of all the relevant journals, go through looking for relevant or interesting articles and present to the group. Those were the days.
Google Reader is an RSS feed aggregator which basically means you can subscribe to RSS feeds and it gives an interface to be able to see them. Sites like PubMed are great for searching for journal articles (PubMed for the medical arena). Their site has changed a lot over the past 10 years. Recently, on the search results page there is an RSS feed symbol (orange symbol in the graphic above) that one can click. In most browsers this will bring up a window in which you can select how to watch the feed. There are lots of offline readers, but I like Google Reader. Many journals also have RSS feeds of the articles that come out.
Another Google tool that works well is Google Docs. It is a good place to writeup documents that need to be shared with others and it keeps revisions of the documents. I can’t say I have used it for writing a paper, yet, but it is getting very close. The one thing that I haven’t worked out is how to put references in a Google Doc though I am sure there is a way.





