Ranging from personal interest in a broad area, to wanting to know which recent research has been most popular or stirred the pot the most, I always find myself wanting to read 2-3 of the latest journal articles.<p>The common question / thread I'm always looking to answer is "whats currently at the bleeding edge", and I've found it hard to do this efficiently without guidance from someone in the field.<p>A quick google search turned up a few resources, but would love to know what HN uses, or what you guys think about this.<p>http://www.myjournals.org/
http://www.tripdatabase.com/
http://www.alphagalileo.org/
Note depending on the field, published research is 6-18 months old by the time its printed, and depending how specific of field you are talking, stuff that is as much as five or even 10 years old may be just as relevant as what has just been published.<p>Second the Google Scholar alert system, its pretty decent. I believe you can set an RSS off of it as well for your research keywords?
I tend to keep track of the popular publications in my field and skim abstracts to see what I find most interesting. Fairly time consuming, but it's the most effective method I've found. Google Scholar also has alerts on new papers that I occasionally find interesting.
MIT's technology review is a pretty good magazine for the newer research that is "stirring" the pot. They also review the latest papers on "ArXiV".. a service for researchers to put up pre-prints of their working papers.<p>www.technologyreview.com
If you want to sample a few, University libraries tend to have the major ones on the shelf. But journals tend to be tuned to a topic. So depends what topic you want to know about.