How to explore/identify similar works in one's own field? I bet most of the users here had one of the following bad experiences: your idea and someone's idea happen to be very similar, manuscript topics got scooped, etc. Among these bad experiences, the worst is perhaps finding out a very similar paper was already published after the experimentation, simulation, writing, or even submission was done. This is very time consuming and stressful.

I realize that this question is very general and field-dependent. However, I would love to learn from your experience on how to efficiently look for related works in one's own field. For instance:


Where (websites, publishers, pre-prints... )
When should we find or update these related works, and
What kind of tricks have you used to perform such searches efficiently.


To help you orient, my background is electrical and computer engineering, communication and image/video processing.
Scholar.Google.com, IEEE, and ACM
After every major conference in your field.
See 1, find a paper, then follow its references and the papers that cite it. Repeat.