Google Scholar - alert, updates and my citations

I have been an avid user of Google Scholar. It is a good way to scope a topic before doing a more focused search for articles via out library database (proquest).  The advantage of Google is that it brings up books, journal articles and reports, so providing a quick way to find out who the fields’ most prolific researchers, which often equates to most cited articles / authors.

There is a video on youtube on using scholar,  providing a general introduction with some good tips on searching more efficiently.

One way to keep up with the ever increasing number of journal articles is to use scholar alert via your gmail account. Every couple of days, a list of about 6 – 10 articles and reports, arrives in my gmail inbox, relevant to the topics of workplace learning apprentic* and occupational identity. So far, a few interesting articles have arrived each week for further investigation.

Scholar alerts is now supplemented by scholar updates. Updates brings up articles that match your latest searches, alerts and the articles archived in scholar citations. So far, the articles updates have thrown up have been useful with about half a dozen articles arriving a week and at least one or two being relevant / useful.
I have now also set up my own citations page. I entered a few articles manually and after a couple of weeks, a few have now generated citations, which is all quite a worthwhile ego trip. Most of my article citations have come from work on mobile learning, but a few on apprenticeship learning now also creeping in. Plus you can also set up a scholar alert to new citations, adding excited anticipation everytime you check out your citations :)  All in, a good resource for researchers.