Efficient method to receive alerts for new publications I am currently using Google Scholar to receive alerts (emails) for new publications in my field. However, to my understanding (I might be wrong) Google Scholar doesn't allow to:


Use regular expression

might very useful for looking at variants (noun, adjective, adverb) of the word of interest

Indicate the field where the matching pattern should be found


author name: if you write the name of an author, you just get all the paper that (s)he publish and all the papers that cite him/her. Also, if the author has a short and common name such as Do then, Google Scholar will basically send tons of articles.
title: If I am looking for a concept that is used in a whole lot of different papers but only few papers really work on it such as the word evolution for example, then it would be useful to be able to ask for publications that contain the word evolution in the title only.
Journal: Well... because we all have our favourite journals.

Use AND and OR statements


Such as for example: Give me all new publications which author is John Smith AND where the word action potential is present in the title OR the article has neurophysiology as a keyword. Something like  author: John Smith AND (title: action potential OR keyword: neurophysiology)



There are probably various algorithms that can be found online that would allow one to receive alerts for new publications. Can you give me recommendations of what (and why) is best to use for receiving alerts?



FYI: My field is evolutionary biology and more precisely theoretical population genetics. I am particularly bothered by the fact that I am working on the concept of robustness in evolutionary developmental biology but the word robustness has meaning in so many different sciences and I just receive tons of alerts that are no relevant to my work.
There are a few things Google Scholar can handle, for example here is a query that can be made into an alert and is similar to what you gave as an example:

author:"John Smith" (intitle:"action potential" OR neurophysiology)

To get all the results from a particular author (with or without articles that cite their work) you can search the author, click on his/her name in one of the results and there will be a "Follow" button on the profile page to get email alerts.

If you click the drop-down in the search box you can fill out the advanced search form to make complicated queries and at the bottom of the search results there is a "create an alert" link, but this option seems to disappear if you specify a journal.

As for using regular expressions, hopefully most of your queries can be solved by using OR, e.g. (color OR colour)