hi, am having to do a lit review again, having found out that what had done before was not the best starting point for my thesis. my question is, how do i keep up with new publications in my area? how do the rest of you do this?

By putting citation alerts all over scopus and science direct. I'm then emailed when a new paper cites these papers as references

I'm subscribed to Dialnet which is an alerts service on new publications which match your interests. It covers journals from all over the world but the system itself is Spanish. I'm sure there must be something like that for the UK. Most of the alerts you receive may not be really interesting for your research but it's helpful somehow.