A great new feature has been added to Google Scholar Citations. For those authors who have set up a citations page, it is now possible to get email alerts for any new articles they publish, or for any new citations of their articles. So you can track citations to your own work this way, and stay up-to-date with key authors in your field.

Setting up a Google Citations page is super-easy and was already worth doing. This new functionality is another reason to do it. After all, as researchers we want people to read our stuff, so we might as well make it as easy as possible for people to find what we write.

To set up your Google Citations page, go to scholar.google.com/citations.

To follow an author, find their citations page and look for the “Follow this author” box at the top right of the page.

Hopefully, Google will add RSS feeds as an option in the future as I’d much rather get alerts that way then by yet more email in my inbox.