Since I entered grad school, one thing I have been struggling with is trying to keep up with all the current research being published. In finance, there are three top journals (Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics and Review of Financial Studies), so in order to stay current my routine was to go on each of their website monthly (or more often bi-monthly) to look at the new papers. However, that meant looking at about 40-50 papers, so I usually picked only a few papers based on the title and authors and only looked at the abstracts for those papers. It’s not that I wasn’t interested in the other papers, it’s just that it seemed too time consuming to look at all of those papers in one session.

I’ve been a big user of RSS for a while now, subscribing to dozens of blogs (to subscribe to PS, use the big subscribe link in the top-right corner), news service and craigslist search results. Lately, I realized that the publishers of the top finance journals – Elsevier, Wiley InterScience and Oxford Journals – all offer RSS feeds to subscribe to the journals.
Obviously, you still need a paid subscription (usually through your institution) to access the full papers, but the convenience of RSS subscriptions is a big time saver for me. Not all journals are created equal however. For JF and RFS, I get the list of papers only when a new issue comes out. For JFE (published by Elsevier), I get frequent updates whenever a paper gets accepted for publication.

No matter what your field is, I’m confident that the most important journals should have RSS feeds too. If they don’t, it’s probably just a matter of time (but you can speed things up by emailing the publisher).

If your don’t already have a RSS feed reader, the most popular one (according to the stats of PS) are Google Reader and NewsGator Online.
On my Mac I use NetNewsWire, a free feed reader that syncs with its companion app on iPhone and iPod Touch. The windows software from the same company, FeedDemon, also syncs with the iPhone app. You can also subscribe directly in Firefox or Safari.

CiteULike is a free online service that lets you manage your scholarly papers. The idea is simple: you create an account and then you can add references in your library. It has a nice features set which includes:

• Export all your references to BibTex and EndNote.
• Integrates nicely with many online database (see here for complete list). This is actually very nice; when you add a paper from one of those database (using the url), CiteULike imports all the bibliographic information plus the abstract. For some databases, it will also add a link to the pdf file of the full article (of course, you need access to the database for that).
• Lets you upload your own pdf files so you can access them from anywhere.
• Create groups so you can share papers with your colleagues or other people interested by a topic.
• Bookmarklet for adding papers quickly (a bookmark that contains javascript). When you are on an article page (like PubMed or JStor), you can just click that bookmark to add the reference to your library.

Those are just the features I find the most useful, there are plenty more. Pretty good for a free site.