I’m going to use three fields as an example: computer science, biology and paleontology. How do keep with interesting developments in each of these fields? Which journals are the most reputable in their respective fields? How do I know that the journal is reputable? If the journal is reputable, how do I know that a particular paper isn’t a fraudulent paper that managed to slip through the cracks?
I’m in Neuroscience. My favorite way to keep up is rss feeds of the 5 best journals (100-200 titles per week), rss feeds to the relevant pubmed search terms (20-50 titles per week) an google scholar email alerts to some of the most relevant researchers in my field, auto forwarding to kill the newsletter, and read through rss (50-100 titles per week, lots of duplicates). So every day I aim to open the rss reader and burn down the unread count. Papers that are really relevant to my research tend to show up 4-5 times over 2 weeks this way, so it’s hard to miss it. Which journals: you know that if you have been in the field for a while, if not, ask your colleagues and mentors where they publish and what they read.
Bad papers sliding through the cracks: it happens, you don’t know unless you read it.
Any rss reader recommendations, preferably cross-platform and FOSS? Also, I’m not a scientist; at least not yet. I’m what you would call a bedroom science enthusiast. I do hope, however, to become a legitimate scientist in computer science someday.
I like QuiteRSS (if you use Linux or BSD, it should be in your package manager). It’s super-easy to sort and manage tonnes of feeds, it’s very clear what is read and what’s unread, and you can set it to never delete unread items. It hasn’t been updated in ages, but it still works (mostly. Once in a while a Qt update breaks it until someone can fix the packaging).
My second favourite isAkregator. It’s almost as easy to use as QuiteRSS, but unread items aren’t as distinctive, and sometimes an unread item looks read.