Ranging from personal interest in a broad area, to wanting to know which recent research has been most popular or stirred the pot the most, I always find myself wanting to read 2-3 of the latest journal articles.
The common question / thread I'm always looking to answer is "whats currently at the bleeding edge", and I've found it hard to do this efficiently without guidance from someone in the field.
A quick google search turned up a few resources, but would love to know what HN uses, or what you guys think about this.
http://www.myjournals.org/
http://www.tripdatabase.com/
http://www.alphagalileo.org/
Second the Google Scholar alert system, its pretty decent. I believe you can set an RSS off of it as well for your research keywords?