How do you keep track of the latest publications in OR

Question

It seems the most common answer to this question is:

we periodically scan the websites of our favorite OR journals

This approach however has several problems:

• you are likely to miss articles.
• you are likely to forget to do this on a regular basis.
• it is labor-intensive and time-consuming to manually scan/navigate journal sites

Some alternatives:

• Academia.com/ResearchGate.net: similar to Facebook: large, unordered stream of messages. Personally I find it unsuitable to keep up-to-date with the latest OR publications. It seems primarily useful to request articles/preprints of articles which fall outside your institution's library subscription. These website tend to send a lot of click-bait.
• optimization-online.org/arxiv.org: excellent resources to obtain early versions/preprints. optimization-online provides a montly e-mail digest. Good source for cutting-edge papers which are work-in-progress or currently under review.
• Google scholar allows you to follow individual researchers and receive an email when the researcher publishes a new article.
• RSS feeds. Many journals provide RSS feeds via which they announce new article publications. RSS readers can aggregate the feeds of different journals. Moreover, you can setup RSS feeds to track publications by individual authors. Sadly, not all top-tier journals keep their RSS feeds up-to-date. Currently, OMEGA international journal of management science for instance hasn't updated their feed for months.
• Twitter: some 'influencers' share important publications on their twitter feed. Relatively efficient but incomplete.
• Some journals send out table of contents via e-mail digests (that is, IFF you can find the link/button to subscribe).

Personally I use RSS feeds together with the popular RSS reader Feedly. Advantages:

• I receive all new publications in 1 place (as opposed to scattered over many emails)
• I can keep track of the ones I read/haven't read.
• I can quickly scan new articles from a large range of journals, and 'tag' the ones I find interesting.

Disadvantages:

• There does not seem to be a single RSS reader which is able to generate a proper ToC which states per article the (1) title, (2) journal, (3) authors. Most journals implement the 'recommendations on RSS Feeds for Scholarly Publishers', so all necessary information to generate a proper ToC is present in the RSS stream, but is simply not extracted by the RSS reader. As per example no author information is shown by feedly for the article 'The Structure of the Infinite Models in Integer Programming' published in Mathematics of Operations Research, as can be seen in the following screenshot:

The latter disadvantage I find quite significant. It would be worth the effort to implement a simple RSS parser which properly extracts the necessary information from various RSS feeds and which is also able to highlight publications made by researchers you are 'following'.

How do you follow the latest developments in OR in terms of paper publications/cutting-edge research? I'm particularly interested to learn of structured, systematic, low-effort approaches.

Answer 1

Very interesting notes about different alternatives.

IMHO, it is not necessary a real-time or periodic scan of updates. Related to a particular topic you're researching, it may be enough to do a full "literature review" every, let's say, three or four months.

However, to be aware of research trends in general, I like to read twitter (periodically), RG and Google Scholar updates (weekly) and OO digest (monthly).

The RSS of engineering blogs are also interesting (for example, google AI blog or uber engineering).

Answer 2

My recommendation is to use something like https://scirate.com/ or even Mendeley also provides recommendations if you have built up a reference list.