I subscribe to multiple RSS feeds from journals. Whenever I feel the urge to procrastinate (e.g. Facebook/9gag), I open up my Google Reader instead, read some abstracts and print some interesting papers. It’s an easy way to keep up to date on the scientific literature by piggybacking on one’s natural propensity to dick around. Ulitsky and Shamir have a short page on the effective use of RSS feeds for keeping up with the scientific literature. One thing I was not aware of is that it is possible to transform a Pubmed search into an RSS feed. So you can simply type up some keywords (or a list of authors, say), add the search as an RSS feed, and receive an update whenever a new paper is out that matches this query. Neat.

Update: Read Labrigger’s much better entry on the subject.