Keeping Track of Publications

This is frustrating. While I’m usually pretty good with keeping up with the latest publications and preprints (via journals’ rss feeds), I like to follow the work of particular groups as well. I do this by going to the group’s webpage (which never works – hardly anyone seems to keep an accurate publication list) or searching on ISI Web of Science (which is far too time-consuming). ISI appears to have an option where they email you updates to your latest saved search, but I can’t figure out how to make it do what I want.

Ideally, there would be an online service (which covered all physics, chemistry, materials science etc. journals) which would allow me to input an unlimited number of author names, and would email me (or provide an rss feed) with updates to their citation record as they occurred. For free. Maybe such a thing already exists, but I haven’t found it.

Update: Via an overly complicated combination of stringing together search terms and saving histories, I managed to figure out a solution on ISI (I think – I’ll have to wait until the first email alert to be certain). As psi*psi points out, Yahoo Pipes may be a viable option, but I haven’t had the time to play around with it to figure out what it can and can’t do.