Figure out which journals cover the subject matter you're most interested in (likely ~5), and read the table of contents whenever a new issue comes out. If you

Figure out which journals cover the subject matter you're most interested in (likely ~5), and read the table of contents whenever a new issue comes out. If you want to stay up to speed on the latest and greatest across a wide range of topics, Science and Nature are often worth a read; those are weekly. And then once you have favorite authors, you can set up automated searches to alert you whenever they publish something. Having a peek at a listing of the talks being presented at conferences usually gives you a sneak preview of what's going to be published "soon" since people often give talks on a subject before they publish a paper on it. Conferences are also broken into subject areas, again helping you find what's of interest to you.