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An important part of the data scientists and researchers’ life is to keep track of publications in their field. Depends on your field and needs publications range from papers in academic conferences and proceedings (some of them you can find as youtube videos), new technology and code packages, blog posts, etc. This post focus on who to keep track of academic research and innovation.

1. Follow the relevant conferences, journals — make sure you are familiar with the main conferences in your field (ee.g.List of Machine Learning and Deep Learning conferences in 2019 / 2020) and follow their publications. You can usually read the accepted papers in the conference website when the paper acceptance is published. Talk slides and videos are usually accessible a short while after the conference. Identifying the relevant conferences may require some initial effort but once you identified it, it is easy to get it going.
2. Google scholar e-mail alerts — track authors and \ or keywords you find relevant for you. E.g if you are interested in causal inference you would probably want to follow Judea Pearl. You can track new articles, citations and new articles related by author or keywords. I prefer to track only new articles because I found the benefit from citations and related articles low. You can also get email alerts by more complex queries. Set your alerts here.
3. arXiv E-Mail Alerting Service — arXiv provides a daily digest of new submissions by subject, it is less granular and less focused than google scholar but can give you access to the newest, hottest submissions. Subscribe to arXiv E-Mail Alerting Service here).
4. Follow blogs and publications of companies and research institutes which interest you — those are usually softer publications that give you a taste of the company’s recent advances and research. If this lights up your imagination, move on to reading the full paper. Examples of such blogs — facebook research blog, OpenAI blog, Google AI blog.
5. Social media — follow researchers which are relevant to your field in twitter, see the papers they publish and recommend, read the discussions they are involved in. Join facebook groups that discuss the topics you are interested in.

Now, you can lean back and enjoy the new ideas coming to you. The next challenge is to wisely invest your time and to pick the papers which will be most beneficial for you.