One important thing in science is to stay up-to-date with the current literature.

Of course, one can manually search for new articles appearing every once a while. But fortunately, there are some means of getting regular updates via emails using the respective search engines for scientific literature, such as ISI Web of Science or NCBI PubMed.

Of course, you can as well create email alerts on some of the publishers' web portals, such as ScienceDirect, or on arXiv.

If you're interested in crystal structures, then you should think about creating an account at pdb.org to keep up-to-date with crystal structures as well.

Brief step-by-step tutorials are available here for the following web tools:

• ISI Web of Science
• NCBI PubMed