Google Scholar alerts: what they cannot do, and the RSS alternatives

Scholar alerts arrive by e-mail only and cannot be exported. Here is how to set them up, where they fall short, and how to get the same coverage as feeds you control.

How Scholar alerts work

Run a search on scholar.google.com, click the envelope icon in the left sidebar, enter your e-mail address and click Create alert. Google's help page says alerts are sent "right after we add new papers to Google Scholar", usually several times a week. You can also create an alert for an author's new papers from their profile, and for new citations of a paper.

What they cannot do

No RSS. The help page describes e-mail delivery only. The autocomplete query "google scholar alerts rss" exists because people look for a feed that is not there.
No export. An alert lives in one Google account; you cannot move it to a reader or share it.
No control over the source. An alert covers whatever Scholar indexes, including preprints, theses and predatory journals, with no way to restrict it to specific journals.
Reliability. "google scholar alerts not working" is one of the top suggestions for the term; alerts can stop silently.

Alternatives you control

Journal feeds. Follow the journals of your field directly. The field pages list every journal with a validated feed and offer an OPML file for the whole field.
PubMed feeds for biomedical topics: any search becomes a feed (see the PubMed guide).
arXiv feeds for physics, mathematics, computer science, statistics and economics, per category or combined (builder).
Preprint servers with feeds, listed on the preprints page.

Keep Scholar for what it does well

Citation alerts on your own papers and author alerts for a handful of people have no feed equivalent. Keep those as e-mail, and move topic tracking to feeds you can read, tag and save in Vite Research.