20 years of Google Scholar

I had an old boss who did it in the old analog way. He had a secretary handle his email and transcribing stuff he hand wrote. He had print subscriptions to a couple nature journals, science, and a couple research niche specific journals and he read them basically cover to cover. He'd attend conferences and had many collaborators who would send him papers from their own lab to opine on.

I actually respect this style a lot. There is a firehose of papers coming onto google scholar each day. You type in some keyword you get 500 hits. This cut that down substantially for him in a way where he never missed anything big (reading nature and science), kept up with what the field has been doing (reading the more niche specific journals and keeping up with the labs who put out this niche work), and seeing what was coming up in the pipeline from the conferences or what sort of research new grants were requesting. I'm not sure that scholar would have helped much.